Amazon India Update
For the first time in nearly a year, e-commerce company Amazon India has announced a change to seller fees on its marketplace. Beginning on April 7, Amazon.in is updating the costs that it charges sellers on its marketplace. These new fees include weight handling, referral, and closing fees, among other ancillary fee types.
The fee adjustments are part of a biannual process; however, this amendment is occurring over a year later. Amazon’s primary goal is to provide sellers with profitable rates.
Statement by Amazon
“These changes reflect our commitment to make Amazon.in one of the most preferred marketplaces for selling in India and creating right choices for sellers to grow efficiently,” an Amazon India spokesperson said. “We recognize seller fees and incentives as strong long-term levers that will help sustain a robust thriving marketplace, focused on digitising small and medium businesses in the country and enabling them to grow into strong national brands.”
Data statistics
Presently, each time a product is sold through the portal, a seller must pay a fee to Amazon that covers costs for technology, shipping, returns, and inventory storage. The categories with the biggest increases in seller fees were home improvement (from 9.5% to 13.5%), premium beauty (from a flat 5% to a tiered system that goes up to 10%), and sleepwear (from 11%–15% to 13.5%–19%). Flip-flops and musical instruments both saw increases in fees; they went from 7.5% to 10.5% and from 10–12.5% to 13–15%, respectively. The e-commerce behemoth not only decreased fees for a few categories, but also for others, such as apparel for babies (from 11-21% to 11-20%), inverter and batteries (from 5-5.5% to 4.5%), and a few others.
Pick and pack and technology costs are the other charge heads. With the removal of the Zero Fee Fulfillment policy, standard-sized shipments costing more than Rs 20,000 will now be subject to a weight handling shipping fee as of April 30, 2024. Amazon said that it will add 18% GST (goods and services tax) to all of the specified fee categories.
