FBA Calculators: The 3 Best Tools For Calculating Amazon FBA Fees

Using an FBA calculator can help you make quick, informed decisions about products and pricing, and ensure the profitability of your business.

There are dozens of FBA calculators available. There’s Amazon’s own calculator and other web-based tools with various additional features. There’s a range of browser extensions, which make it really quick to calculate fees when browsing existing products on Amazon.

For sellers who want to experiment with factors like size and weight, or who just prefer to work in Excel, there are spreadsheet-based calculators.

In this post we are going to highlight the best Amazon FBA calculators of each type, and explain all the pros and cons.

Why use an FBA calculator?

Using an FBA fee calculator can not only allow you to get a handle on costs, but also allow you to make dynamic business decisions. You can tinker with the sales price, product costs, dimensions and weight, and immediately see the effect on your profits. This can inform your Amazon pricing strategy and decisions about packaging and manufacturing.

A calculator can help you compare costs for different products and decide on the best products for you to sell. By altering the dimensions and weight of your products, you can experiment with different packaging options and see the best option to keep FBA fees low. You can also compare product variations, for example by bundling accessories or creating multi-packs, and immediately see the impact on your profit margins.

For businesses with their own shipping operation, an FBA calculator helps you compare FBA to your own fulfillment so you can make decisions about your business model, or decide which approach to use with each product.

The best web-based FBA calculator

There are several other web-based FBA calculators out there, but we think that’s Amazon’s own is still the best.

Amazon’s FBA calculator is available in English for:

• North American marketplaces (United States, Canada and Mexico)
• European marketplaces (United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Spain)

It’s a great tool if you are researching products that are already on Amazon. You can search for items by product name or code (e.g. UPC or ASIN) and quickly calculate selling and FBA fees.

If you want to browse Amazon alongside it, it’s usable but clunky. You will need to keep the calculator open in one window, and the main Amazon site in another, and copy-and-paste between them to calculate fees on the different products you find.

What is it best for?

Overall, Amazon’s calculator is a good fit if you:

1. Already know which Amazon products you are interested in selling.
2. Want to compare FBA fees to your own fulfillment.

It’s not so great if you want to:

1. Calculate fees as you browse products on Amazon.
2. Control whether storage is peak or off-peak.
3. Enter a detailed breakdown of product costs.
4. Do “what-if”calculations with different weights and dimensions.

How does it work?

Amazon’s calculator is designed as a side-by-side comparison of FBA versus your own fulfillment. If this is not relevant to you, you can simply ignore the column showing your own fulfillment costs.

You have to find the product on Amazon first, then it automatically pulls weight and dimensions from the listing details. Then you enter the item price, item cost and your own shipping and fulfillment costs (if applicable).

Finally, it calculates the fees and your resulting profit. It also generates bar charts for revenue, costs, proceeds and profit, to easily compare FBA to your own fulfillment.

What to look out for

Amazon’s FBA calculator applies the storage rate at the time of calculation. There is no option to choose the number of months during the peak Q4 period and the number of months at other times of the year. For example, if you use it in June to calculate the FBA fees for an item that will be sold in the lead-up to Christmas, the off-peak storage rate will be applied, which will not be an accurate reflection of your storage costs.

If the products you are interested in are not already on Amazon, this is not the best tool for you. It is of course possible to select a comparable item that is listed, but as the selling and FBA fees depend on getting exactly the right dimensions, weight and product type this is a risky approach.

The other main limitation is that since there is no way to alter the dimensions or weight of the product, you cannot use it to compare different packaging options.

The best browser-based FBA calculator

We liked AMZScout’s Chrome extension. It is free, popular and well supported.

This tool is particularly useful if you are browsing Amazon for product ideas, and want to get a quick cost calculation. The toolbar button is very convenient to get fee information on-screen almost immediately.

What is it best for?

AMZScout’s extensions works well if you want to:

1. Calculate FBA fees while browsing products on Amazon.
2. Enter advertising costs and taxes.

It’s not a good fit for:

1. Comparing FBA fees to your own fulfillment.
2. Doing calculations with different weights and dimensions.

How does it work?

Unlike Amazon’s calculator, there is no need to enter a product name or code with AMZScout. Instead you install the extension and activate it when you are on any product page.

Just like Amazon’s calculator, there are data entry fields for product cost and selling price, estimated monthly sales, and the cost of shipping to Amazon. There are additional fields for CPC advertising and taxes (as a percentage).

However, there are no charts and no built-in way to compare your own fulfillment costs against FBA’s.

What to look out for

The same caveats apply as for Amazon’s FBA calculator: this is only a useful tool if the product you are interested in is already on Amazon.

Again, there is no way to alter the dimensions or weight of the product and it only uses the storage rates in effect at the time of calculation.

AMZScout’s extension works for:

• Amazon.com
• Amazon.co.uk
• Amazon.ca
• Amazon.de
• Amazon.es
• Amazon.fr
• Amazon.it
• Amazon.in
• Amazon.com.au
• Amazon.co.jp

The best Excel-based FBA calculator

We found a great Excel spreadsheet for calculating FBA fees at EcomCrew, a site founded by ecommerce entrepreneurs Mike Jackness and Dave Bryant.

The spreadsheet is available via an Office 365 plugin on EcomCrew’s blog post. EcomCrew also kindly gave us permission to provide a direct download of the spreadsheet.

This Excel-based FBA calculator offers full flexibility to adjust product weight, dimensions and category – something you can’t do with the other calculators. As an editable spreadsheet, you can also modify it to meet your own requirements. The sheet is password protected only to prevent accidental changes – the password is “ecomcrew”.

For example, we adjusted the direct download above to have separate fields for peak and off-peak storage instead of the rates being averaged over a year.

What is it best for?

This spreadsheet works really well if you need to:

1. Do “what-if”calculations with different weights and dimensions.
2. Enter your own customized product cost breakdown.
3. Adjust or add to the calculation in any other way.

It’s not so great if you:

1. Just want to calculate selling and FBA fees for existing products on Amazon.
2. Aren’t comfortable working in Excel.

How does it work?

You can use the calculator directly on EcomCrew’s website, using the plugin, but many sellers will prefer to download it so they can save the data, make formula changes and use it offline.

To run a calculation, enter your product data into the light blue cells. The results are shown in the bright yellow cells.

In addition to the sales price and manufacturing cost, you will need to enter the weight and dimensions of your product. You can then adjust these variables and see the impact of different product design and packaging choices on your bottom line.

If you save the spreadsheet you can then use and adapt it as your own. For example, you could create sheets for different products, add additional fields for different product costs, and feed the results into other spreadsheets.

What to look out for

Be sure to enter the dimensions according to the instructions – with the longest first and shortest last. It is also crucial to select the correct product category from the drop-down box.

In the spreadsheet hosted on EcomCrew’s site, the storage fees are calculated at a fixed ratio of 9/12ths of the off-peak rate to 3/12ths of the peak rate. You’ll need to adjust this if it doesn’t fit your needs. Also be aware of it if you are comparing the results to one of the other FBA calculators – they don’t work the same way.

Because you have to enter the weight, dimensions and product category manually, you might prefer to use Amazon’s own calculator or AMZScout to calculate fees for products that are already on Amazon.

This spreadsheet is only available for Amazon.com and is based on today’s fees and rate structure. When the fees are inevitably updated, you will have to download a new version of the spreadsheet or update it yourself.

So which is the best Amazon FBA calculator?

The best FBA calculator depends on your specific needs. From the three covered in this post we recommend that:

• If you want to compare your own fulfillment costs with Amazon FBA, and your products are already on Amazon, use Amazon’s own calculator.
• If you know exactly which products you will be selling (preferably by ASIN), use Amazon’s own calculator.
• If you don’t know which products to sell and want to calculate fees while browsing on Amazon, use AMZScout’s Chrome extension.
• If your product does not already exist on Amazon, use EcomCrew’s spreadsheet.
• If you want to experiment with the weight and dimensions of your product, use EcomCrew’s spreadsheet.

As a final point, in addition to the fees covered by the FBA calculators above, there are a whole host of other costs that you might incur whilst using FBA, including:

• Long term storage fees (for goods stored for 6 months or longer)
• Product removal and disposal
• Labeling, bagging, bubble wrap and taping
• Returns

You will need to factor in these costs (or at least have an awareness of them) in order to have a clear picture of your financials and not get any unwelcome surprises!