Overview

Amazon’s Referral Fee Preview Report delivers an estimate of the referral charge attached to each active SKU in a seller’s inventory. The file is refreshed on a daily schedule, but the data can lag up to three days, so it reflects the most recent price settings rather than real‑time transactions. Sellers who rely on precise margin calculations should incorporate this preview into pricing reviews and catalog audits.

Key Points

• Estimate based on listed price — The preview calculates the fee from the current selling price shown on the detail page, ignoring any shipping or gift‑wrap fees that might be added at checkout.
• Other fees may still apply — In addition to the referral charge, categories such as media or apparel can trigger variable closing fees, which the preview does not display.
• Data freshness up to 72 hours — If a price was changed this morning, the report may still show the previous figure until the next refresh cycle.
• One download per day — Amazon enforces a 24‑hour cooldown, so sellers should schedule the export to align with pricing updates or bulk‑upload cycles.
• Tab‑delimited text format — The report arrives as a .txt file that can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, or any database that accepts delimited inputs, making bulk analysis straightforward.

How the Referral Fee Preview Report Works

1. Request generation — From Seller Central, navigate to Reports → Fulfillment (or the dedicated “Payments” area), select “Referral Fee Preview” from the report‑type dropdown, and click “Request.” For example, a seller with 5,000 SKUs clicks the button on March 15 2026 to generate the file for that day’s price list.
2. Report compilation — Amazon’s system pulls the current list price for every active SKU, applies the category‑specific referral percentage, and writes the result to a tab‑delimited text file. In the same example, a toy listed at $19.99 would be paired with an estimated 15 % fee, yielding a $3.00 preview amount.
3. Download and open — After the generation window (usually a few minutes), the file appears under “Available Reports.” The seller clicks “Download,” saves the .txt file, and opens it in Excel, where each row represents a single SKU and columns include seller‑SKU, ASIN, item name, price, and estimated fee.