Overview

Amazon’s 2026 fee redesign replaces flat‑rate hikes with a variable system that ties costs to seller performance, product dimensions, inventory age, and marketplace location. The change forces sellers to treat every SKU as a separate profit center and to align operational efficiency with fee outcomes. Ignoring the new levers will erode margins, while proactive adjustments can unlock measurable savings.

Key Points

• Size‑tier pricing — Fulfillment fees now vary by the exact size class of each item, storage length, and chosen shipping speed, creating distinct cost curves for a 12‑inch box versus a 6‑inch envelope.
• Long‑term storage penalties — Items held in Amazon’s warehouses for more than 90 days incur accelerated daily fees, pushing the cost per cubic foot up by up to 40 % compared with the standard rate.
• Wider tier gaps — The fee differential between adjacent size tiers has been expanded, so trimming a box by just 1 cm can shift a product from Tier C to Tier B and save roughly $0.15 per unit.
• Performance‑linked adjustments — Late‑shipment percentages and customer‑complaint ratios now feed directly into the fee formula; a seller with a 2 % late‑shipment rate pays 5 % less in fulfillment fees than a peer with a 5 % rate.
• Regional fee divergence — European marketplaces now charge 12 % higher fulfillment fees for the same size tier than the U.S., while Canada offers a 5 % discount on storage fees for high‑turnover SKUs.
• Mandatory SKU‑level profitability — Flat mark‑ups across product families are no longer viable; each SKU must be evaluated for landed cost, storage exposure, packaging efficiency, and account health impact.

What's Changing

1. Dynamic size‑tier assessment — Amazon measures each item’s longest side, girth, and weight at the time of receipt. For example, a 10 × 8 × 2 inch shoe box that previously fell into Tier C may be re‑classified as Tier B after the seller reduces the height to 1.8 inch, lowering the per‑unit fulfillment fee from $2.45 to $2.30.
2. Accelerated long‑term storage fees – After the 90‑day threshold, the daily storage rate jumps from $0.015 per cubic foot to $0.021. A 0.5 cubic‑foot product stored for 120 days therefore incurs an extra $0.63 in fees versus the standard schedule.