Amazon FBA Revenue Calculator

Written out

Net revenue from an FBA sale is what Amazon actually deposits: price − referral fee − fulfilment fee − storage − any per-unit surcharges. It is the figure before your own cost of goods, and it is what the settlement report shows.

Gross revenue is the price times units and is largely meaningless for decision-making. Net proceeds is the number that funds everything else.

Running the numbers

The $29.99 product: $29.99 less $4.50 referral, $4.25 fulfilment and $0.09 storage leaves $21.15 of net proceeds, 70.5% of the sale price.

Across 1,000 units a month that is $29,990 of gross revenue and $21,150 of net proceeds. Cost of goods at $8.50 takes $8,500, leaving $12,650 before advertising.

The 29.5% Amazon takes is the number to internalise. A seller planning around gross revenue will consistently overestimate what the business generates by roughly 42% of what it actually receives.

What gets missed

Settlement is on a fourteen-day cycle with a reserve held against returns and disputes, so net proceeds and cash received are different things at different times. A growing seller is always owed more than they have been paid.

Refunds also appear in later settlement periods than the sales that generated them, which means a single fortnight's settlement is a poor guide to a month's economics.

What to do next

Model on net proceeds rather than gross revenue everywhere: pricing, advertising budgets, cash forecasts. The gross figure is useful for describing the business to other people and for nothing else.

Then reconcile a full month of settlements against your own model. Amazon's reports are detailed enough to trace every deduction, and the exercise usually finds at least one fee type nobody had modelled.

Settlement timing and the cash trap

Amazon settles fortnightly, holds a reserve, and pays after the return window on much of the volume. Meanwhile stock has to be bought, shipped and often paid for months in advance.

For a growing seller that produces a structural cash gap: sales rise, which means more stock has to be bought sooner, while the proceeds from the last batch are still in the settlement cycle. Businesses fail in that gap while trading profitably, and the faster they grow the wider it opens.

The arithmetic worth running is the full cash cycle: days from paying a supplier to receiving settlement for the goods. On a product with a 60-day production and shipping lead time, 30 days of stock cover and a 14-day settlement lag, that is over 100 days. Every dollar of growth needs a dollar of funding for that long, and knowing the number is what makes the growth rate a decision rather than an accident.

Match the settlement report to your own order records by order ID rather than by totals. Aggregate figures agree far more often than the underlying lines do, and the discrepancies that matter: a fee applied at the wrong rate, a refund without a return, a reimbursement never issued. Are only visible line by line.

Storage costs rise sharply in the fourth quarter and long-term storage fees escalate on aged inventory, neither of which appears in a per-unit revenue calculation. A SKU that looks profitable at standard rates can be marginal once peak storage and aged inventory surcharges are counted, which is why the calculation should be run against the rates that will actually apply rather than the annual average.