Amazon is responding to rising fuel and other prices by attaching a 5% surcharge to sellers who use the company’s Fulfillment by Amazon service, according to a notice sent to sellers on Wednesday. The surcharge will go into effect April 28 and apply to U.S. sellers who outsource the warehousing, packing, and shipping of their products, both apparel and non-apparel.
Fulfillment by Amazon offers services to sellers for various fees, outlined in the schedule here. Some of those fees had been set to rise in January, others in February, with still more fees scheduled to rise in May. Fees had a median increase of 4.4% in 2021. This year it appears the overall fee increases could reach 12.5%.
In the memo to sellers, Amazon said costs had risen during the Covid-19 pandemic, driven by increasing hourly wages, hiring of workers, and the need for more warehouses. During the pandemic closures, Amazon’s business boomed as the public increasingly turned to online shopping.
“In 2022, we expected a return to normalcy as COVID-19 restrictions around the world eased, but fuel and inflation have presented further challenges,” the company wrote.
In July 2020, Amazon sites had 213 million unique visitors in the US, according to LandingCube.com. There are also 112 million Amazon Prime members in the US.; 66.4 million households in the US have an Amazon Prime subscription. Many Alaska households are in the Prime membership program, which for an annual fee reduces or eliminates shipping costs. It’s unclear how the new fee hike will be passed on to those Prime members.
