If the stars align, under the new structure that will be totally in place starting on April 1st, there’s actually an opportunity to save money over LY. Not LY including the rebates for splitting, but before that.
That IF is a big IF - Amazon must provide you with a split that avoids the placement fee on every shipment. If you are not a volume seller, you won’t get those splits and that’s the problem and an indication that Amazon is not as interested in the small time seller as they used to be because they will be punished by this. Remember, the FBA fee is going down under the new plan to account for some of the placement fees but the rebates are gone. It’s been a bit since I reviewed everything but I believe storage is going down too.
Those rebates for us were routinely 2-3X more than the freight and they are history as far as I can tell.
When all of this was announced in Dec, I dug through all the documentation and carefully went over it with our SAS manager (strategic account services, not sellers ask sellers). It was clear that this wasn’t really that bad and there was an opportunity to be cost neutral or even save a little with how we operate. We ran the new structure through some real-life scenarios.
GGX and I often disagree and butt heads here but I do agree with this 1000%: