Top 5 Amazon News for December 2022

Amazon announcement:

“(…) We continue to invest heavily in people, technology, transportation, and infrastructure to innovate on behalf of our selling partners. We do this while also working to be more efficient and manage our costs to serve you and customers, so we can provide an amazing service that is also a great value. Today, we would like to share the updates we are making to our U.S. referral and Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) fees that will take effect on January 17, 2023, except where otherwise noted.

Referral fees will remain unchanged. These fees provide sellers with traffic from hundreds of millions of customers, an attractive shopping experience for customers, payment processing, fraud prevention, and much more. We will remove the following fee categories: Collectible Coins, Entertainment Collectibles, Sports Collectibles, and Collectible Cards. Impacted ASINs will be re-categorized to their most suitable product category, which may result in different (some lower, some higher) fees for those re-categorized products.

Earlier this year, we introduced a Fuel & Inflation Surcharge for our FBA fees for what we believed may only be temporary cost increases. These cost increases have not attenuated as quickly as we had hoped, so we will adjust our standard FBA fee rates to account for these increased costs and we will remove the separate Fuel & Inflation Surcharge at this time. These changes are reflected in the below summary.

(…) We will increase FBA outbound fee rates by $0.22, on average, which is below fee increases announced by other fulfillment and logistics providers. As part of this, we will introduce more granular weight tiers for FBA outbound fees (at the quarter and half pound level) to better align fees with shipping costs.

(…) We will reduce the returns processing fee rates for customer-returned products in the Apparel and Shoes categories by an average of $0.20 per return.

We will increase the monthly off-peak storage fee (January to September) for standard-size products by $0.04 per cubic foot and oversized products by $0.03 per cubic foot. We will increase Peak storage fees (October to December) for our non-sortable network by $0.20 per cubic foot, while those for our sortable network will remain unchanged.

We will introduce a storage utilization surcharge for sellers who have a high cube of inventory stored in our fulfillment centers relative to the cube of their recent weekly sales. We estimate this will impact approximately 7.5% of sellers who use the highest volume of storage relative to their sales volume. This change will take effect on April 1, 2023.

We will increase the surcharges applied to inventory stored between 271-365 days. Additionally, we will introduce aged inventory surcharges on inventory stored between 180-270 days, excluding products in the following categories: Apparel, Shoes, Bags, Jewelry, and Watches. These changes will take effect for the April 15, 2023 aged inventory assessment date. We encourage you to check your aged inventory and take action on these products. These changes will help drive more efficient use of our storage and create more capacity for sellers who are using space efficiently.

We will increase removal and disposal fees driven by increased costs of these services. Liquidation fees will remain unchanged. To learn how to configure your settings for automated liquidations or removals, go to remove inventory automatically.

We will lower fees for the U.S. FBA New Selection program. We will increase the rebate on sales for eligible new-to-FBA parent ASINs from 5% to 10% on average, increase the number of units eligible, and extend the time period of eligibility for certain benefits within the program. The rebate will still be applied for sellers who meet specific criteria. For more information, please visit: FBA New Selection.

We will reduce fees by expanding the Small and Light Program and increasing the item price for eligible products from $10-or-less to $12-or-less, enabling sellers to realize the program’s lower fees for more of their selection. For more information, please visit: 2023 FBA Small and Light fee changes.

These changes are designed to allow us to collectively better serve customers while ensuring that we continue to provide you with a great value relative to alternatives. On average, these fee changes are below those announced so far by other logistics providers. In addition, Amazon’s fulfillment fees will remain an average of 30% less expensive than standard-shipping methods offered by other major third-party logistics providers, and an average of 70% less expensive than comparable two-day shipping alternatives.”

ProMerit Tip: Many updates to fees have been published, so it’s a good time to go and check the category in which you’re selling, just to make sure you are taking everything into account. Each of these fees will have a direct impact on brand profitability, and bear in mind they may vary depending on the category. Pay close attention to inventory, where you’ll need to focus on storage utilization and storage time, as those variables will play an important role.