Selling on Amazon UK: a guide for established brands

Most guides to selling on Amazon UK are written for someone starting a business. This one is for a brand that already has one: products, a supply chain, customers through retailers or its own website, and a finance director who wants to know whether Amazon will add profit or just turnover. We bring the pieces that decide that answer into one model, from fees and fulfilment to advertising, channel conflict and the choice between Vendor and Seller, and link to our detailed guide on each. If you only want the fee tables, start with Amazon selling fees in the UK.

Amazon is not a small channel to ignore. It says more than half of all physical product sales in its UK store come from independent selling partners, most of them small and medium-sized businesses, and that around 100,000 UK SMEs sell there¹³. Your products may already be on it through resellers, whether you chose that or not.

Is selling on Amazon worth it?

For a brand, it is worth it when each product keeps a healthy margin after everything Amazon takes and after the advertising it needs to sell. That depends mostly on one thing you already know: your margin structure, meaning your landed cost as a share of the price you can charge.

Here is one product, sold through FBA on Amazon.co.uk. The fees and VAT follow Amazon’s and HMRC’s published rules; the product, its cost and its advertising are illustrative.

The referral fee is 15% for Kitchen and most other categories³, and Amazon charges it on a fee base that includes “any taxes and customs duties"⁴. The 2% digital services fee applies to Selling on Amazon and FBA fees³. The fulfilment fee is the UK rate for a small parcel up to 900 g⁵, with the surcharge in force since 17 April 2026⁷, and storage is £0.76 per cubic foot a month for most standard-size products from January to September⁶. VAT is 20%¹⁵, one-sixth of a VAT-inclusive price.

Amazon’s own fees come to £7.94, or 26.5% of what the shopper pays. The sale leaves £6.15, a 24.6% margin on the £24.99 that remains after VAT. Before advertising the product makes £9.15, so its break-even ACoS is 36.6%.

Now change only the landed cost. Everything else stays the same:

That table is the honest answer to “is selling on Amazon worth it?”. A brand at 20% to 30% has room to advertise, absorb fee changes and still make money. A brand at 50% is one fee increase, one bad returns month or one competitor’s bid war away from losing money on every sale, and has almost no room to advertise. Higher prices, bundles and multipacks move a product up the table; so does cheaper fulfilment, which is why the fulfilment decision below matters.

The five decisions that set your Amazon margin

Each of these has its own guide. Here is how they fit together.

1. Fees. The referral fee, the 2% digital services fee and the selling plan are fixed by category and price, but thresholds matter: in some categories a few pence on the price changes the referral rate. Our seller fees guide has every rate and a full £20 example.

2. Fulfilment. FBA, Seller Fulfilled Prime or your own warehouse, decided per product. Small, fast products are usually cheapest through FBA; bulky and slow ones often are not. See what FBA is and when it pays, FBA fees in the UK, FBA vs FBM and Seller Fulfilled Prime.

3. Advertising. Amazon Ads charges per click, at a price set by auction². Set each product’s ceiling from its margin, not from an account-wide target. Amazon Ads reports sales without VAT¹⁰, so compare ACoS with margin on the ex-VAT price. Our guides to PPC strategy and a good TACoS show how.

4. Channel conflict and pricing. If your retailers or your own site sell the same products, your Amazon price affects all of them. Amazon’s fair pricing policy also lets it remove the Featured Offer, or the offer itself, where a price is significantly higher than recent prices on or off Amazon¹². Our guides to Amazon for manufacturers and running Amazon, TikTok Shop and your own site together cover pricing, pack sizes and what UK competition law allows. The Buy Box guide explains how the Featured Offer is chosen.

5. Vendor or Seller. Selling wholesale to Amazon through Vendor Central swaps fees and advertising control for a cost price, payment terms and deductions. It is a per-product decision too: see Vendor Central vs Seller Central and how Vendor Central works in the UK.

A worked monthly P&L

Scale the £29.99 example up to a range selling 1,500 units a month, all at the same economics. This is an illustration; the fee lines follow Amazon’s published UK rates.

Three things in this P&L are easy to miss.

The overhead line. Someone has to manage listings, stock, advertising and account health. Whether that is your team, a freelancer or an agency, it belongs in the Amazon P&L, not in head office. Our agency pricing guide shows what outside help typically costs.

The launch. A new product rarely sells at a 12% TACoS in its first months; it needs reviews, rank and advertising above break-even first. If a range spends, say, £4,500 more on advertising than the steady state over its first 90 days, the P&L above repays that in under a month once it arrives. The risk is that the steady state never arrives, which is why every launch needs a budget and an end date. Our product launch guide sets out a 90-day plan.

Cash. Amazon releases a seller’s funds seven days after the delivery date as standard, and can extend that reserve after assessing risk and performance¹¹. Add the stock sitting in FBA and in transit, and a growing Amazon channel ties up working capital before it returns any. Plan for it with your finance team before the first shipment, not after.

How Amazon compares with your other channels

The question a finance director asks is “compared with what?”. Here is the same product through four routes. Every figure except the Amazon fees is illustrative, and each route has costs this table leaves out, so treat it as a template rather than a verdict.

On these assumptions, Seller Central leaves the most per unit, but it also asks the most of you: you carry the stock, the advertising and the operation, and you are exposed to every fee change. Wholesale and Vendor are lower per unit but simpler. The website keeps the customer relationship and data. The point is not that one route always wins; it is that the comparison should be made per product, on contribution, before you decide where each product sells and at what price. Our guide to Tesco Marketplace makes the same per-order comparison for another UK marketplace.

How to sell on Amazon UK: the path for a brand

The order matters, because each step depends on the one before it.

The plan price and Professional features are from Amazon’s UK pricing page, which lists on-site advertising, API integration, multiple users and restricted categories as Professional features². The registration checklist is from Amazon’s UK seller page¹. Brand Registry is free and needs a pending or registered trade mark from the trade mark office of a country with an Amazon store⁸; Sponsored Brands ads are only available to sellers who are the registered brand owner⁹. Product titles must now not exceed 75 characters including spaces, and an item highlights field adds 125 characters shown below the title in search results and on the product page¹⁴.

Each step has a detailed guide: Brand Registry in the UK, listing optimisation and how Amazon search ranks products, FBA vs FBM, PPC strategy and inventory management.

If you are not VAT-registered yet, check before you register on Amazon: UK businesses must register once taxable turnover passes £90,000 in 12 months, and businesses based outside the UK must register if they supply goods in the UK at all¹⁶.

When Amazon is not worth it

In our experience Amazon is the wrong channel, or the wrong channel for now, when:

• Landed cost is above about 45% of the ex-VAT price and there is no route to a higher price, a bundle or a cheaper pack.
• The product is cheap and bulky, so fulfilment and storage take most of the margin whichever route you use.
• You cannot hold your prices coherently across channels, and a key retailer will walk if Amazon undercuts it.
• You cannot fund the stock and the launch, or wait for the reserve, without starving the rest of the business.
• Nobody owns the channel. An Amazon account left to run itself tends to drift: listings get edited by others, stock runs out, and advertising keeps spending.

None of these is permanent. Each is a reason to fix something first, or to start with the part of the range where the numbers work. If you are weighing Amazon against TikTok Shop as your next channel, our guide to which to open first compares the two.

Measure it from month one

Revenue is easy to see on Amazon; profit is not. The habit that separates the brands that make money on Amazon from the ones that only make sales is a monthly look at profit per product after fees, fulfilment and advertising, followed by decisions: which products to push, which to reprice or repackage, and which to stop advertising or delist.

Start with your best 10 to 20 products, model each one with the FBA calculator, and only widen the range when the first products show the profit the model promised.