What it really costs an established brand to launch on Amazon UK: a year-one budget

Ask what Amazon costs and most answers stop at the fee on each sale. Our seller fees guide takes a £20 sale (including VAT) apart line by line. A board needs a different number: what the first year costs, when it pays back, and how much cash leaves first.

A brand new to Amazon asked us for exactly that, and wanted to start with a short list of its best-sellers. Its questions were the ones every new brand asks: what will it cost to start, what might we sell each month, what will it cost to run, and should we build delivery into the price? This guide answers them, with every fixed cost from the vendor’s own page and a 12-month budget you can copy.

The three parts of a year-one budget

• Set-up costs, paid once or yearly: plan, trade mark, barcodes, images and A+, Vine.
• Running costs, paid monthly: advertising, storage and people’s time.
• The cost of each sale: landed product cost plus Amazon’s referral, digital services and fulfilment fees.

Stock and payout timing decide whether you can afford it; see the cash section.

Set-up costs: what each one costs today

The selling plan. “The Professional plan costs £25 (excl. VAT) per month no matter how many units you sell"¹. The Individual plan costs £0.75 per unit sold instead¹, but a brand that wants Brand Registry, advertising and Vine should budget for Professional: £300 a year.

A trade mark, for Brand Registry. Amazon describes Brand Registry as “a free programme”, and its requirement is a “pending or registered trademark for your brand name or logo"². The cost is the trade mark. GOV.UK says: “It costs £205 to register a single trade mark in one class. It costs £60 for each additional class"³. Two classes cost £265, plus any lawyer’s fee; if you already own a UK mark, this line is zero. Our Brand Registry guide covers which marks Amazon accepts and how long each step takes.

Barcodes, if you need them. For most categories, Amazon says, “you are required to associate your products with industry-standard product identifiers”, and if a product has none “you can request an exemption"⁵. If you already sell to retailers, you probably have GS1 barcodes already. If you need them, GS1 UK sets the annual fee by turnover: £50 a year up to £99,999, £100 up to £499,999, £130 up to £999,999 and £200 for £1,000,000 to £9,999,999, with higher bands above that; “all prices exclude VAT"⁴.

Images and A+ content. Your own cost if you shoot in-house, or a quote if you don’t. Get it before you finalise the budget, for every product you launch.

Vine, for the first reviews. Amazon charges a one-off enrolment fee per parent ASIN: £0 for 1 to 2 units, £60 for 3 to 10 and £140 for 11 to 30⁶. Amazon adds that it won’t charge the fee “if no reviews are received or if the first Vine review is published more than 90 days from the enrolment submission date”, and that “FBA and referral fees are applicable to Vine orders"⁶. So the real cost is the fee, the units and Amazon’s fees on them. Our Vine guide covers eligibility and when it pays back.

Running costs: the lines you control

Advertising. Amazon says “Sponsored Products campaigns have no monthly or upfront fees. You bid the maximum amount that you’re willing to pay when a shopper clicks an ad for your products"⁷. Plan it as a share of sales that starts high, while products have no reviews, and falls as conversion improves. Our product launch guide sets a 90-day launch budget from your margin.

Storage. For standard-size products in all categories except “Clothing and Accessories, Eyewear, Footwear, Rucksacks and Handbags”, the UK rate is £0.76 per cubic foot a month from January to September and £1.51 from October to December⁸. The storage utilisation surcharge only applies once your first shipment is more than 365 days old⁸, so it skips year one. See our FBA fees guide for the rate card.

People. Someone has to build the listings, run the advertising, plan stock and read the reports every week: a share of a salary in-house, or a fee for an agency or freelancer. If you are weighing an agency, our agency pricing guide shows how to test any quote.

Inbound shipping to Amazon’s warehouses is whatever your courier charges; the worked example folds it into the product’s landed cost so it can’t be forgotten.

The cost of each sale

Our seller fees guide covers this in depth, so here is just the unit the budget is built on: a £24.00 product that ships as a small parcel up to 400 g.

Amazon’s 2026 non-peak fee for a small parcel up to 400 g is £3.00¹⁴. On top of that, “Starting 2 November 2026, the fuel and logistics-related surcharge will increase from 1.5% to 2%“¹³, so the fee becomes £3.00 × 1.02 = £3.06. Amazon says “most referral fees are between 8% and 15%“¹, and that the UK digital services fee of 2% applies as a percentage increase to Selling on Amazon fees, including the referral fee, and to FBA fulfilment fees¹⁰. Here that is 2% × (£3.60 + £3.06) = £0.1332, which rounds to £0.13. So Amazon’s fees on this unit come to £3.60 + £3.06 + £0.13 = £6.79, and the product keeps £8.00 of its £20.00 price excluding VAT before any advertising. Run your own products through our FBA calculator for the UK.

One more fee to watch: festive peak fulfilment fees apply “from 15 October 2026 to 14 January 2027” for selected UK FBA orders¹³, which takes this small parcel from £3.00 to £3.11¹⁴. Amazon has not yet published a peak fee for 2027, so the example uses the non-peak fee all year. If a similar fee returns, add about 11p a unit, plus surcharge, from mid-October.

Should you build delivery into the price?

On Fulfilment by Amazon the answer is simpler than it is on your own website. Amazon says its fulfilment fees are “charged per unit sold, inclusive of packing, shipping, handling, customer service and returns"⁹. Delivery to the shopper is already in the £3.06 above. So the question is whether your Amazon price keeps your margin after that fee, and how it compares with your own site’s price plus delivery.

A worked 12-month budget

Here is the whole year for an illustrative brand (not the brand above). Every figure is invented except Amazon’s, GOV.UK’s and GS1’s fees.

The assumptions, so you can swap in your own:

• Sales: 300 units in month 3, rising to 1,200 a month from month 9. That is 9,300 units and £186,000 of sales excluding VAT over the year.
• Advertising: £2,500 a month in months 3 to 6, then £2,400 a month. That falls from 42% of sales in month 3 to 10% from month 9.
• Storage: an average of 2,000 units at 0.05 cubic feet each, which is 100 cubic feet, from month 2. At £0.76 that is £76 a month, and £151 in October to December at £1.51⁸.
• Plan and people: £25 for the Professional plan¹ plus £1,000 a month of in-house time (an invented figure, about a day a week). Total £1,025 a month.
• Set-up in month 1: trade mark in two classes £265³, GS1 barcodes in the £1m to £9.99m band £200⁴, and £4,000 for images and A+ content, a placeholder for your own cost or quote. Total £4,465.
• Vine in month 2: 10 units on each of eight parent ASINs is a £60 fee each⁶, so £480, plus 80 units at £12.00 each (£5.21 product cost and £6.79 of Amazon fees), so £960. Total £1,440.

For the year: £74,400 − £24,400 − £1,061 − £12,300 − £5,905 = £30,734.

When do we break even?

Monthly break-even is the first month with a profit; cumulative break-even is when the running total turns positive. Here monthly profit turns positive in month 4, the second month of sales, and cumulative profit turns positive in month 7, when £4,499 of profit more than covers the £3,235 still to recover. The worst point on the profit budget is −£9,232, at the end of month 3.

Where the year’s money goes

Amazon’s fees on each sale are £63,147 of £155,266, about 41% of the year’s costs. A budget built from the fee per sale alone looks far healthier than the year turns out.

Test it at half the sales

Halve every month’s units: margin before ads falls to £37,200, and the year becomes £37,200 − £24,400 − £1,061 − £12,300 − £5,905 = −£6,466. That is with advertising unchanged; cutting advertising when sales fall short closes much of the gap, because every pound not spent comes straight off the loss. Write that rule down before launch, with the month you will review it.

Cash: why the bank account needs more than the budget

The bank account tells a different story from the profit budget, for two reasons.

Stock is paid for months before it sells. In this example the brand pays for its first 3,000 units (£15,630 at £5.21 landed) in month 1, and for reorders of 4,000 units (£20,840) in months 5 and 8, so that stock arrives before each order runs out.

Amazon pays you after delivery, and holds a new seller’s money longer. Amazon’s standard reserve is “seven days after delivery date”, and “if you have just started selling, it is normal for all of your funds to be held in reserve"¹². To keep the sum simple, the table assumes each month’s sales reach your bank the following month, at £13.21 a unit: the £20.00 price excluding VAT less £6.79 of Amazon fees.

So the brand needs £44,736 of cash at its lowest point, in month 5, nearly five times the worst point on the profit budget. The month 8 reorder dips it again, but not below that. At the end of the year the profit budget shows £30,734 and the bank £6,025. The £24,709 gap is real money still in the business: £8,857 of unsold stock (11,000 units bought for sale, 9,300 sold, at £5.21; the 80 Vine units were bought and given away in month 2) and £15,852 of December sales not yet paid out. VAT timing is left out for simplicity; your accountant will want it in.

Take this number to the bank or the board, alongside the profit budget. Our one-page business case template shows how to present both, with stop rules.

What we left out, on purpose

Amazon’s new seller incentives. New sellers who complete Brand Registry before or within six months of listing their first offer, and who are the first selling partner with a brand representative role for the brand, can get a New Brand Bonus: a referral-fee discount of “10% on the first £40,000” of eligible branded sales and “5% on the next £760,000"¹¹. Amazon says it “is calculated on the final item price (including VAT/taxes)“¹¹. Here £186,000 of sales is £223,200 including VAT, so the bonus would be worth 10% × £40,000 + 5% × £183,200 = £13,160 over the year.

New branded products sent to FBA may also qualify for the New Selection Programme (2026), with fee discounts and free storage on the first 200 units¹⁵. The two referral discounts don’t stack: Amazon says the sales discount “may not stack with other bonuses or rebates offered by Amazon, including the New Selection bonus, but you will be awarded with the more favourable bonus"¹¹. We leave both out of the base budget: confirm eligibility first, because a plan that only works with a credit is fragile.

Returns and refunds. They vary too much by product to invent a rate; start from your own website’s return rate.

How to build your own

The first step matters most. In our view, an established brand should launch the few products that already earn most of its sales elsewhere, prove them on Amazon, and then widen the range: fewer images to pay for, fewer Vine enrolments, less stock tied up, and advertising spent on products that can win. Our guide to selling on Amazon UK as an established brand covers the profit model for each product and the channel questions that come with it.