Amazon fee analyzer
Amazon’s fee structure is famously fiddly. The Amazon Fee Analyzer pulls every fee line from your settlement reports and arranges them so you can see what’s actually eating your margin.
In this guide:
- Open the fee analyzer
- Read the fee breakdown
- Drill by SKU or fee type
- Spot fee anomalies
Step 1: Open the fee analyzer
Go to Finances → Amazon fees in the sidebar.
The page has three sections:
- Top-line totals — total fees in the period, broken into Referral, FBA, Storage, Other.
- Fee-type breakdown chart — stacked bar over time.
- Per-SKU table — fees by SKU, sortable by total fees, fee-as-percent-of-revenue, or any specific fee column.
Step 2: Read the breakdown
The fee types Hilal tracks:
| Fee type | What it is |
|---|---|
| Referral fee | Amazon’s percentage of sale price; varies by category (~8–15%). |
| FBA fulfillment | Pick, pack, and ship cost per FBA unit. |
| FBA storage | Monthly storage at the fulfillment center, scaled by cubic feet. |
| Long-term storage | Surcharge on inventory sitting at FBA over 271 days. |
| Removal & disposal | Cost to remove or dispose of inventory you’ve stranded. |
| Returns processing | The cost of receiving, inspecting, and restocking a returned unit. |
| Refund administration | Amazon’s $5 minimum or 20% of referral, whichever is less. |
| Other | The miscellaneous categories Amazon’s reports use. |
Step 3: Drill by SKU or fee type
Sort the per-SKU table by Fees as % of revenue descending — the SKUs at the top are eating their margin in fees, often a sign the unit price is too low for the fee structure.
Click a SKU row to open per-fee-type history for that SKU. Useful for spotting trends (“our FBA fulfillment fee jumped in May” — Amazon updated their fees).
Step 4: Spot fee anomalies
The fee analyzer highlights anomalies automatically:
- Long-term storage lighting up red on a SKU means it’s been at FBA too long; consider running a removal order or running a price-down promotion to clear it.
- Returns processing spiking on a SKU often signals a quality or listing-accuracy issue.
- Referral fee changing for a SKU usually means Amazon recategorized it — verify category in Seller Central.
Troubleshooting
- Fees don’t match Seller Central exactly. Hilal pulls from settlement reports, which lag actual events by ~14 days. Settlement-period fees should match Seller Central exactly; very recent days will be approximate.
- A specific fee is missing. Some niche fees (Amazon Vine, Sponsored Brands video uploads) only appear in some reports. They roll up under Other.
- A SKU shows zero fees but you know it had sales. Settlement assignments are per-period; check the date range and try the previous settlement window.