Amazon FBA Profit Tracker: What Amazon Really Takes

An Amazon FBA profit tracker calculates what you actually keep from a sale after Amazon's cut, your cost of goods, and advertising. Amazon's own referral fee runs 5% to 45% by category with 15% the most common rate and a $0.30 minimum per item, and the Professional selling plan is $39.99 a month. Once fulfillment, storage, returns, and ads are stacked on top, sellers commonly report an all-in Amazon take of 25% to 35% of revenue. The number most tools get wrong is not the fee math but the timing, because Delivery Date Based Reserve holds revenue until 7 days after delivery and an account-level reserve holds more on top of that.

Fee figures here come from Amazon's published US pricing as of August 2026 and can change. This is general information, not accounting or tax advice.

What is an Amazon FBA profit tracker?

It is software that takes a sale, subtracts everything that eats into it, and shows the margin left. The subtractions fall into three groups, and they come from three different places, which is the whole reason this category exists.

Amazon knows the first group: referral fees, FBA fulfillment fees, storage, long-term storage surcharges, refund administration, and coupon or Lightning Deal costs. All of it appears in your settlement reports.

Amazon partly knows the second group. Advertising spend sits in the Ads console rather than the settlement report, so a tool has to pull both and line them up against the same ASIN before the number means anything.

Amazon does not know the third group at all: what you paid your supplier, freight and duty to get units into the country, prep and inspection, and the cost of units that arrived damaged. You have to supply cost of goods yourself. Any tool claiming to show true profit without you entering COGS is showing you revenue after Amazon fees, which is a useful number but is not profit.

What percentage does Amazon FBA take?

There is no single percentage, which is why the question gets answered badly so often. Amazon publishes a referral fee range of 5% to 45% depending on category, with 15% applying to the majority of categories and a $0.30 minimum per item sold. Everything else is a separate charge.

Fulfillment fees are the part worth checking yourself rather than trusting a blog table. They are set by a rate card keyed to size tier and price band, Amazon has adjusted them more than once during 2026, and published third-party summaries of those changes disagree with each other. Use Amazon's Revenue Calculator with your actual dimensions and weight before you commit to a product.

Stack it all together and the commonly reported all-in take is 25% to 35% of revenue. That is a reported range from sellers rather than an Amazon figure, so treat it as a sanity check on your own numbers instead of a benchmark to plan against.

Why your Amazon payout never matches your profit calculation

This is where most sellers lose confidence in their own spreadsheet. You calculate a healthy month, then the disbursement lands at a fraction of it, and the two numbers never reconcile. Three separate mechanisms cause that gap, and none of them are fee math.

The first is Delivery Date Based Reserve. Since it took effect across North America on March 12, 2026, revenue from an order is deferred until 7 calendar days after the order is confirmed delivered. That is the DD+7 rule. A sale made on the 1st might not become available funds until well into the third week of the month.

The second is the account-level reserve, a rolling buffer Amazon holds against returns, A-to-Z claims, and chargebacks. Amazon publishes no formula for it. New sellers commonly see something in the region of 10% to 20% of sales held, and established accounts with clean metrics report roughly 3% to 7%, but these are seller-reported observations rather than a policy you can rely on. While you keep selling, this buffer never fully releases.

The third is the settlement cycle itself. Disbursements run on a roughly 14-day cycle for Professional sellers, and the ACH transfer then takes another 3 to 5 business days to post. Stack all three and an FBA order commonly takes 14 to 27 days to travel from sale to bank.

Your payout report separates funds into Available, Reserved, and Deferred for exactly this reason. A strong sales month with a thin disbursement is usually not a problem, it is timing. The detail behind the buffer is covered in our breakdown of the Amazon account level reserve, and the full cycle in the Amazon seller payout schedule.

Profit tracker or payout tracker: which do you actually need?

These get marketed as the same thing and they answer different questions. Buying the wrong one is the most common way FBA sellers end up paying for two overlapping subscriptions.

Being direct about where we sit: Earnly is a payout tracker, not a profit tracker. It records every Amazon disbursement with the gross sales behind it, the referral and FBA fees deducted, the take-home that reached your bank, and the expected date, then puts Amazon on the same board as Shopify, Etsy, Stripe, PayPal, and the rest. It does not track cost of goods, freight, or ad spend, so it does not produce a margin figure or a profit and loss statement. If SKU-level margin is the question you need answered, buy a dedicated FBA profit tool and enter your COGS. If the question is what each channel paid you and when, that is the Amazon payout tracker job.

How to track FBA profit without buying five tools

A workable setup for most sellers has three layers, and only the first is mandatory.

Start with unit economics before you buy anything. Run each product through Amazon's Revenue Calculator with real dimensions and weight, add your landed cost per unit, and check the margin survives a 15% referral fee plus fulfillment. Products that only work at a 10% ad cost tend to stop working the first month a competitor bids harder.

Add a profit tool once you have more than a handful of SKUs, because that is the point where per-ASIN margin stops fitting in your head. The value is in linking ad spend to the right listing, which is the single most common blind spot.

Then handle the money side separately, because it is a different question. You want to know what landed, what is still deferred, and what is coming. If you sell anywhere besides Amazon, that view has to span channels or you are back to opening five dashboards on the same afternoon. It also helps to reconcile each disbursement against the bank line it produced, since Amazon's clawbacks for refunds arrive on later settlements and quietly break month-over-month comparisons if nobody ties the two sides together.

One habit is worth more than any subscription: record gross and fees separately as they happen, rather than reconstructing them from net deposits in April. Reconstruction is what turns a routine tax return into an expensive one, as our breakdown of accountant cost for self-employed work spells out. A per-platform fee breakdown keeps the split intact from the start.

The short version

Amazon's referral fee is 5% to 45% by category, 15% for most, with a $0.30 minimum, and the Professional plan is $39.99 a month. Add fulfillment, storage, returns, and ads and sellers commonly report 25% to 35% of revenue going to Amazon in total. None of that is profit until you subtract your own cost of goods, which no Amazon report contains.

If your disbursement looks wrong, check timing before you check fees. DD+7 defers revenue until a week after delivery, the account-level reserve holds a rolling buffer with no published formula, and the settlement cycle plus ACH adds two to three weeks. Sellers tracking several channels can see the whole picture on a multi-platform income tracker, and the income tracking for Amazon sellers page covers the workflow. Earnly reads your numbers and never touches your money. It is not a bank, a lender, or a payment processor, and it does not give financial, accounting, or tax advice.