Guide
What selling on Amazon actually costs in the UAE
Three fees, VAT on top of them, and a storage clock that punishes slow stock. The arithmetic worked through on a 100 AED sale, with every figure taken from Amazon's own fee page rather than from memory.
Every figure on this page was read from Amazon's published fee page on 14 September 2026. Amazon changes its fees, and when it does this page becomes wrong. Before you commit to anything, check sell.amazon.ae/pricing — that is the authority, and this page is not.
The three fees
Amazon does not charge you one fee. It charges three, and they behave differently — one scales with your price, one with the size of the box, and one with how long the box sits still.
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Referral fee — a cut of the sale
A percentage of the total price, including the item, the shipping you charged and any gift wrap. It starts at 5% with a minimum of 1 AED, and it varies by category: Amazon says most sit between 4.5% and 15%. Consumer electronics is 7%. Apparel and books are 15%. Some categories change rate at a price threshold — baby and beauty are 8% up to 50 AED and 15% above it.
This one is unavoidable. You pay it whether Amazon touches the parcel or not.
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Fulfilment fee — a cut of the handling
Only if you use FBA. It starts at 7.5 AED per unit and rises with the size of the unit. This is the number that decides whether FBA makes sense for a cheap product: on a 30 AED item it is a quarter of the price before the referral fee has been taken.
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Storage — a cut of your patience
Charged monthly on the daily average volume you occupy, in cubic feet. Then, separately, anything still sitting in a fulfilment centre after 365 days attracts a long-term storage fee on top.
Storage is the fee people forget, because it does not appear on any single sale. It is a rent on stock that is not moving, and it is the reason FBA rewards fast sellers and quietly punishes everything else.
And then VAT, on the fees
Amazon lists all of those fees excluding VAT and adds it afterwards. It is one line on their page and it is easy to read past, but it raises every fee above by 5%. The worked examples below include it, because a calculation that leaves it out is wrong by exactly the margin most people are arguing about.
What is left of a 100 AED sale
Two categories at opposite ends of the referral range, both fulfilled by Amazon. Both use the lowest published fulfilment fee and neither includes storage, so treat these as the best case rather than a quote.
| Sale price | 100.00 AED |
|---|---|
| Referral fee (7%) | −7.00 AED |
| FBA fulfilment (from) | −7.50 AED |
| VAT on those fees (5%) | −0.73 AED |
| Amazon takes | 15.22 AED (15%) |
| You keep | 84.78 AED |
| Sale price | 100.00 AED |
|---|---|
| Referral fee (15%) | −15.00 AED |
| FBA fulfilment (from) | −7.50 AED |
| VAT on those fees (5%) | −1.13 AED |
| Amazon takes | 23.63 AED (24%) |
| You keep | 76.37 AED |
Neither figure includes the cost of the product, shipping stock into the fulfilment centre, advertising, or returns. If your margin before Amazon is under about 30%, the arithmetic stops working before you have bought a single click.
FBA is one of three options, not the default
Amazon offers three fulfilment routes in the UAE and the right one depends on your stock turn, not on which sounds most professional.
Fulfilment by Amazon
You ship stock to Amazon, they pick, pack, deliver and handle returns. Referral fee plus from 7.5 AED a unit plus storage.
Worth it when stock turns quickly and you are competing on delivery speed. Expensive when it does not.
Easy Ship
You hold the stock, Amazon collects and delivers. Referral fee plus a shipping fee from 14 AED per shipment by size — and you can charge the customer up to 10 AED of it back.
The middle option, and the one people skip past. Often the right answer for bulky or slow-moving stock.
Self ship
You hold it and you ship it, through whichever carrier you like. Referral fee only, plus whatever your courier charges.
Cheapest on paper. You are buying that saving with your own time and your own delivery promise.
Before any of it: the account
To take money you need a bank account and a credit card on file — Amazon deposits proceeds into the bank account with fees already deducted, and charges anything the balance does not cover to the card.
Selling as a business in the UAE also means a trade licence, and which licence depends on your activity, your emirate and whether you are mainland or free zone. That is a question for the relevant authority or a formation consultant rather than for a marketing agency — we would only be guessing, and a wrong answer there is expensive.
On the selling plan itself: Amazon's page says the Professional plan is available with no monthly subscription fee for a limited period. Worth confirming that is still true on the day you sign up, because "limited time" offers are exactly the sort of thing a page like this gets wrong six months later.
When FBA is the wrong answer
- Your average order value is low. A 7.5 AED floor on a 40 AED product is a fifth of it before the referral fee.
- Your stock turns slowly. Storage is charged monthly and again at 365 days; FBA is a bad warehouse and a good delivery service.
- You are testing a product. Prove it sells on Easy Ship or self ship first, then move it to FBA once the turn justifies the rent.
- Your margin before Amazon is thin. Nothing on this page gets cheaper with volume — the referral fee is a percentage.
If you would rather not run it yourself
This is what our Amazon seller management service covers — Seller Central, listings, advertising, FBA setup and inventory planning, and the account problems nobody wants to deal with. Most sellers here end up on both marketplaces, so Noon is usually the next conversation.
If the arithmetic above says Amazon is not for you, that is a useful answer too, and it costs you nothing to have reached it here.
Figures checked against Amazon's UAE seller fee page on 14 September 2026. This guide explains how the fees fit together; Amazon's page is the authority on what they are. Where the two disagree, they are right. Nothing here is legal, tax or licensing advice.