Transform Your Fee Transparency into Tactical Advantage
Amazon’s Fee Explainer Tool empowers sellers right from the start by offering crystal-clear visibility into the makeup of their Amazon fees transforming a once opaque billing process into actionable insights. By breaking down complex charges per transaction, sellers can seamlessly integrate this information into their daily and weekly workflows: use it during pricing reviews to adjust profit margins in real time, incorporate fee data into inventory audits to flag slow movers charging high storage fees, and cross-reference as part of monthly financial reconciliation to catch and resolve discrepancies swiftly. This heightened transparency means you’re not just paying charges you’re understanding them. As a result, you can more confidently optimize pricing strategies, tighten inventory turnover, and maintain tighter control of your profit and loss statements all within your existing Seller Central routine.
Primary Purpose & Core Functionality
The tool is embedded within Seller Central’s Transaction View and activated by clicking on a fee in the Payments > Transaction View section.
Its purpose is to dissect total Amazon fees for each transaction, giving sellers clear insight into what they’ve been charged and why
Strategic Uses of Fee Explainer Insights
Precision Pricing based on Cost Drivers
Once you see the exact breakdown of your fulfillment, referral, and storage costs per unit, you can set cost-plus pricing strategies that protect your margins (e.g., ensuring a minimum 15–20 % profit over fees)
You can also model value-based pricing: if the fee breakdown shows mechanisms for premium positioning, you can price confidently above competitors by emphasizing unique features or bundle value
Inventory & SKU Optimization to Reduce Fees
Use the tool to pinpoint high storage or long-term inventory fees on slow-moving SKUs. Then shift to just-in-time restocking, bundle low-turn SKUs with fast sellers, or even issue removal orders before long-term fees apply
Fee Explainer data helps you decide when it’s more cost-effective to use FBM instead of Amazon FBA for oversized or low-velocity items
Profitability Monitoring & Competitive Intelligence
By linking per-item fees to velocity and net revenue, you create a profitability matrix for each SKU—enabling focus on fast-moving, high-margin SKUs, and trimming or repricing underperformers.
Combine Fee Explainer data with competitor tracking (via tools like Jungle Scout or Seller App) to align pricing strategies with what the market is actually charging and winning on the Buy Box
In Practice: How to Make It Work for You
Periodically export or note fee breakdowns for sample SKUs in different fee brackets (e.g., large vs standard size, fast vs slow movers).
Use that data to define:
Price floors and ceilings when configuring automated repricing rules.
Inventory restock alerts, avoiding long-term storage fees on aging units.
Run A/B pricing experiments (e.g., toggle coupons or price tiers) and use Fee Explainer insights to assess which option yields stronger net profit.
Build simple internal profitability dashboards, mapping fee components against revenue and velocity to identify flagged SKUs that need action.
Based on cost breakdowns, test changes in packaging, bundling, or fulfillment method (FBA vs FBM) for select products and monitor impact.
Seller Tips
Explore Transaction View and start clicking into fees test with recent, high-fee orders.
Use SKU Economics to view profitability at SKU level.
Download date-range transaction reports to automate tracking and compare Fee Explainer data to statements.
Combine with your COGS and PPC data (via Excel, Xero, QuickBooks, or Sellerboard) for complete ROI analysis.
Summary
Fee Explainer lets sellers click into any Amazon fee for a transaction and see a granular breakdown.
It covers all common Amazon fees, from referral to storage and refunds.
No special seller type needed accessible to all.
When combined with business analytics tools and Seller Central reports, it helps sellers reconcile accounts, optimize pricing, manage inventory, and track profitability.