How to calculate your real Amazon profit

The formula

Profit = sales − Amazon's fees − landed cost of the units sold − advertising − returns and refunds + reimbursements − the rest of your costs. Each part:

• Sales: what buyers paid for your products, less promotions and coupons. Not the sales tax: Amazon collects it and pays it to the states, so it was never yours.
• Amazon's fees: the referral fee on every sale, the FBA fee on every unit shipped, monthly storage, and the fees that apply only sometimes (inbound placement, low inventory, returns processing, removals). The seller fees guide lists them all.
• Landed cost: the product, plus freight, duty, customs, prep and inspection, per unit. This is the cost to use, not the factory price.
• Advertising: all ad spend for the period, including ads that didn't lead to a sale.
• Returns and refunds: what you lose on each return beyond the price you give back (below).
• Reimbursements: what Amazon pays you for units it lost or damaged, or that buyers never sent back. Money in, and often money left on the table: see the FBA reimbursement rules.
• The rest: software, photography, samples, your own pay. Outside the profit per unit, but part of whether the business makes money.

Seven costs that go missing

1. Freight and duty. A $6.00 product that costs $7.70 by the time it reaches Amazon has a $7.70 cost. When a new order costs more than the last one, units from the old batch still sell at the old cost, so cost each batch rather than using today's price for everything.
2. Storage, above all from October to December. Standard-size storage is $0.78 per cubic foot a month from January to September and $2.40 from October to December, and units kept over 180 days pay an aged inventory surcharge on top. Stock that sells slowly costs more than the monthly bill suggests. The storage fee calculator works it out for your item.
3. Returns. When a buyer returns a unit, you refund the price and Amazon refunds its referral fee, less a refund administration fee of the lesser of $5 or 20% of the referral fee ($0.75 here). The FBA fee is not refunded, and a unit that comes back damaged is the whole landed cost gone. Above the category's return-rate threshold (8.1% in Home and Kitchen) Amazon also charges a returns processing fee on each extra return.
4. Ads measured by ACoS. ACoS is ad spend ÷ the sales the ads brought in, so it looks only at ad sales. For profit use TACoS: all ad spend ÷ all sales. A product at 25% ACoS where 40% of sales come from ads has a TACoS of 10%, the figure in the example. The ACoS calculator works out both, and the ACoS at which ads break even.
5. The fees that come and go. The low-inventory-level fee when stock runs short, the inbound placement fee when a shipment goes to fewer warehouses than Amazon wants, removal and disposal fees when stock is cleared out. They don't show on any one order, so they're easy to miss.
6. Estimated fees instead of the fees charged. The fees shown when an order comes in are Amazon's estimate; the ones that count are in the settlement report weeks later. They differ when Amazon re-measures a product into a bigger size tier, or changes its rates on January 15 or October 15. An overcharge from a wrong measurement is one you can claim back.
7. Promotions and coupons. The discount is the obvious cost; coupons and deals also carry their own Amazon fees, which appear in the settlement report, not on the order.

Why your payout isn't your profit

A payout is the money Amazon sent for a settlement period, and it differs from profit in several ways at once:

• It holds back sales delivered in the last week or so (the delivery date reserve) and pays out the ones held from the period before: see Amazon DD+7.
• It takes off refunds for sales made in earlier periods, and storage for the month before.
• Ads paid by card never appear in it; ads charged to your seller account do.
• It never subtracts your product cost, freight or duty.
• A payout your bank turned down comes back in the next one, which then looks far bigger than its sales.

The settlement report guide walks through every line. Profit by payout is still a useful check, as long as the product cost of the units in it is taken off.

Work it out per product, every month

A store's total can look fine while a few products lose money on every sale and the best sellers cover for them. In a spreadsheet, once a month:

1. Download the month's settlement reports (Payments › Reports Repository in Seller Central).
2. Group the order lines by SKU: units, sales, refunds, referral and FBA fees as Amazon charged them.
3. Multiply each SKU's units by its landed cost, from the batch those units came from.
4. Add each SKU's ad spend from the advertising console, or spread the total by sales if you can't split it.
5. Share out the charges that aren't on an order (storage, the plan, removals) and add reimbursements.
6. Sort by profit per unit and look hard at the bottom of the list.

MyProfit does this every night from your settlement reports: profit by product, by day and by payout, with Amazon's actual fees, landed costs from your supplier invoices batch by batch, and ad spend from your campaigns. Its free plan finds the money Amazon still owes you and checks your FBA fees.

Amazon's fees in the example come from its 2026 US fee schedule, FBA fulfillment and storage fee pages, read October 2 and 3, 2026. The product cost, freight, duty, ad spend and return rate are example figures: use your own. Amazon can change its fees at any time.