3.13.2013

death by a thousand fees #amazon

So I sent a bunch of books to Amazon to sell under the Fulfilled by Amazon program. Seemed like a quick and easy way to make some money. If, of course, by "make some money" you mean "lose some money", since I just paid 41 cents to sell a book. Here's the statement for a copy of Lolita:
Buyer pays:                                       $3.99
Amazon fees
Commission:                                      -$0.60
FBA per unit fulfillment fee:                -$1.00
FBA weight based fee:                        -$0.46
Fixed closing fee:                                -$0.99
Variable closing fee:                            -$1.35
Change to your seller account balance:  -$0.41
5 separate fees on a single transaction? This makes eBay look straightforward.

My bad, I should have done my research, but until now I've had all positive vibes from Amazon.

The takeaway is: if you're going to use FBA, which right now, I obviously do NOT recommend, you better jack your prices up.

1 comment:

  1. MNPunk22:37

    That sucks. I've had a similar experience with their CloudPlayer product. You know, $25 a year, they backup all my music andi can stream it all I want. Great, except it took a month to get it all uploaded thanks to their tool constantly timing out. Then it didn't take any of my album art, but rather did its best to guess (and you know it's best guess is usually way off with my record collection - that you stole!)

    Add to it that it wouldn't import most odd WMA, M4A and OOG files, and....well I won't be renewing next year.

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