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Comment by miles | Hacker News Reader

The current headline on both the article and HN submission ("Amazon Takes a 50% Cut of Seller's Revenue") is not accurate; the actual base rate is 8-15% according to the article. If a seller elects to use Fulfillment by Amazon, that adds another 20-35%, and advertising on Amazon can add up to another 15%, again according to the article.

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FBA prices are ok-ish. You can undercut them by using your own ligostics. But to do so you have to know what you do logistics wise, and most sellers don't. Multiplatform selling was one of the main reasons to quit FBA, but Amazon started, if memory serves well, a service that covers sales over different marketplaces. Plus, FBA gets you Amazon Prime and that coveted Buy Box, doing the same as a marketplace seller is possible but hard.

>Plus, FBA gets you Amazon Prime and that coveted Buy Box, doing the same as a marketplace seller is possible but hard.

Correct.

My FBA and FBM margins are very comparable. What is not comparable is the colossal boost in sales that comes from getting the buy box and Prime logo.

Walmart takes a different approach, and as a result its FBA equivalent isn't nearly a sales booster. <https://np.reddit.com/r/WalmartSellers/comments/xh2zd5/walma...>

The 50% figure is accurate, though. It's written in the most shocking way possible, but it's not incorrect. I'm not saying that I agree that 50% is overpriced, since electing to do your own fulfillment and advertising elsewhere will still represent an expense. Sellers may very well be pay just as much or more if they take care of their own fulfillment and advertise elsewhere. I don't know.

FBA is not a fuction of the unit price though, you say 20-35% which may just be what it ends up in, but its based upon package dimensions and weight.

Ah, nice to see someone with insights to the inside:-)

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