Amazon FBA (Fulfilment by Amazon) gets a lot of hype, and some of it is deserved. The model lets you send stock to Amazon's warehouses, and Amazon handles storage, picking, packing, and posting orders on your behalf. For the right products, it's a genuinely scalable way to sell online. For the wrong products — or approached without understanding the cost structure — it's a good way to lose money slowly.
This guide is written for UK sellers who are considering FBA for the first time. It covers how it works, what it actually costs, and what you need to think through before sending your first shipment.
The basic process:
The appeal is that you're removed from the daily logistics of dispatching orders. At scale, this is significant. The cost is that Amazon takes a meaningful percentage of every sale, plus storage fees on top.
This is where a lot of new FBA sellers underestimate their costs. Amazon's fees are multi-layered.
Amazon charges a referral fee on every sale — a percentage of the item price that varies by category. For most product categories in the UK it's 15%, though some categories are lower (electronics accessories can be 7–8%) and some are higher. This is on top of everything else.
This is the fee Amazon charges for picking, packing, and posting your item. In the UK, it's calculated by size and weight. A small standard-size item (like a book or small toy) costs around £2.80–3.50 to fulfil. A medium parcel can be £4–6. Large or heavy items get expensive quickly.
Amazon charges monthly storage fees per cubic metre of space your stock occupies. Standard monthly rates are manageable, but Amazon applies aged inventory surcharges on stock that's been in their warehouses for extended periods — so slow-moving stock becomes increasingly expensive to hold.
There's a Professional Seller subscription of £25/month (plus VAT) for sellers who want access to the full suite of tools and aren't limited to 35 sales/month. You may also encounter inbound shipping costs, labelling fees, and removal fees if you need to get stock back from Amazon.
For a detailed breakdown of selling fees on UK marketplaces including eBay vs Amazon comparisons, our UK seller fees guide covers the key differences.
Go to sell.amazon.co.uk and register. You'll need to verify your identity, provide bank account details, and choose between Individual (no monthly fee, 75p per sale fee instead, limited to 35 sales/month) and Professional (£25/month, unlimited sales, more tools). For serious reselling, Professional is the right choice from the start.
Registering as a business (sole trader or Ltd company) rather than an individual gives you access to better sourcing terms, makes accounting cleaner, and is the right setup for treating this as a business rather than a hobby. Our Amazon Business account guide covers the specific advantages for resellers.
Product research is where most of your early time should go. You're looking for products where:
Source your product from wholesale suppliers, retailers, or manufacturers. Before shipping to Amazon, products need to meet Amazon's packaging requirements — labels (FNSKU barcodes), polybags for certain items, bubble wrap for fragile goods. Amazon's prep requirements are documented in Seller Central and vary by product type.
In Seller Central, you create a shipment plan that tells Amazon what you're sending and how many units. They'll assign you a fulfilment centre. You print labels, prepare boxes to their specifications, and ship via a carrier (Amazon Partnered Carrier rates through Seller Central are usually competitive).
Once live, watch your inventory levels, sales velocity, and any issues flagged in Seller Central. Reorder before you run out of stock — Amazon penalises listings that go out of stock in terms of search ranking. Keep an eye on storage age to avoid long-term storage surcharges.
FBA works best for products that are:
Common categories where UK FBA sellers do well include: books, certain toys, health and beauty, kitchen accessories, sports equipment, and niche hobby items.
They serve different purposes and aren't mutually exclusive.
eBay is better for: unique items, collectibles, one-offs, condition-dependent products, and items where buyer trust in photos matters. You control the listing fully.
FBA is better for: identical new goods in quantity, where Amazon's fulfilment scale and Prime badge convert buyers, and where you want to remove yourself from daily logistics.
A lot of UK resellers operate both — eBay for collectibles and unique finds, Amazon FBA for scalable commodity products. The overhead of managing both is real, but the combined reach is significant.
The sensible approach to FBA as a beginner is to start small: validate one product, send a small test quantity, see how it sells, learn the process. Resist the urge to go all-in on a large inventory before you understand how your product moves and whether the margins hold in practice.
The resellers who thrive on Amazon FBA treat it like a business, not a side hustle hack. That means proper product research, disciplined margin calculation, and not chasing every "hot opportunity" that comes from YouTube courses.
If you want to understand the sourcing side in more depth — where UK resellers find products to sell on Amazon and eBay — our UK reselling guide is the right starting point.