Amazon.com Inc. is squeezing more money from the nearly 2 million small businesses that sell products on its vast online marketplace as sales growth slows and costs rise.
For the first time, Amazon’s average cut of each sale surpassed 50% in 2022, according to a study by Marketplace Pulse, which sampled seller transactions going back to 2016. The total cost of selling on Amazon was calculated by adding the commission on each sale, fees for warehouse storage, packing, and delivery, and money spent to advertise on a site with hundreds of millions of products competing for attention. It is optional to pay Amazon for logistics services and advertising, but most merchants consider these to be a necessary part of doing business.
