Amazon Landed Cost: The Fees That Are Not on Any Invoice
Your factory unit cost is the smallest number in the stack, and it is the one most people model most carefully.
Bolang Solutions is a trading company. We chose the model on purpose: it lets us buy across many factories instead of selling you one production line, inspect goods we don't manufacture, and put our own name on every export document as seller of record. The industry's trading-company horror stories are concealment stories — so we run the opposite playbook: registered scope public, address public, and a standing invitation to verify us on gsxt.gov.cn the same way we verify suppliers.
On shipments we trade, the commercial invoice, packing list and bill of lading carry Bolang as seller of record. One counterparty, legally on the hook, answering in English.
Verify us the way we verify suppliers — our registered name, address and Unified Social Credit Code are published on this site; look us up on gsxt.gov.cn.
Most Amazon cost models are built at launch, when the numbers that dominate a mature product — returns, storage on slow-moving stock, removals — are all still zero. The model then looks healthy for exactly as long as the product is new.
The stack, in the order it hits you
Before the goods move: unit price, tooling amortised over the run, prep and labelling, inner and outer packaging, and any testing or certification the market requires.
Getting there: inland transport in China, export handling, ocean or air freight, insurance, destination charges, customs duty and any trade-remedy duty, broker fees, and delivery to the fulfilment centre.
Selling it: the marketplace referral fee, the fulfilment fee, monthly storage, and advertising — which is not optional for a new listing and belongs in the unit economics rather than in a marketing budget.
The ones added late, if at all: returns and the refund handling that accompanies them, removal or disposal of unsellable returns, long-term or aged-inventory surcharges on stock that did not move, and the cost of the capital sitting in inventory for the whole cycle.
Why the late ones decide the outcome
Returns are the clearest example. A returned unit costs the outbound fulfilment, the refund, the return processing, and then either a re-prep to make it sellable or a disposal. One return therefore removes the margin from several sales rather than one — which is why a category with an unremarkable return rate can behave completely differently from one without.
Storage behaves similarly: it is trivial while stock turns and punitive when it does not, so it is smallest exactly while you are building the model and largest when you are relying on it.
Therefore, model a full year rather than a first shipment, and run it at a sell-through rate you have not achieved yet as well as the one you hope for. A model that only works at the optimistic rate is a forecast, not a cost.
On the numbers this page does not give you
Every fee above is set by the marketplace, varies by category, size band and country, and changes. We publish no figures for them here, because a number in a guide is right until it is not and nothing tells the reader which side of that it is on. Take the current schedule from Seller Central for your marketplace and put it into your own model.
The same applies to our side: we publish no prices. Sourcing, inspection, freight and prep are quoted per request, in writing, before any work starts — because they depend on the product, the factory and the destination, and a headline rate that ignored those would be marketing rather than a price.
Common questions
We will not give you a number — it depends on category, return rate, ad spend and how fast the stock turns. What is worth insisting on is that whatever number you choose survives at a slower sell-through than you are forecasting.
It depends on your market and the valuation basis, and on whether freight and insurance are included in the dutiable value. It is a question for your broker; getting it wrong in a model understates the stack considerably.
Yes — delivered pricing is something we quote, and we show the components rather than one number so you can check each against your own broker and forwarder. Quoted per request, in writing.
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