Amazon will raise prices on third-party sellers for the second time this year — this time adding a holiday fee for merchants who use the company’s fulfillment services to pack and ship items to customers.
The so-called “holiday peak fulfillment fee” will run from Oct. 15 to Jan. 14 and increase costs for sellers in the US and Canada by an average of 35 cents per item sold, according to a notice the company sent to merchants last week that was reviewed by The Post.
The fee comes after the e-commerce goliath passed along a “fuel and inflation surcharge” to its sellers in April that amounted to an average increase of 24 cents per unit.
“We have experienced significant cost increases and absorbed them, wherever possible, to reduce the impact on our selling partners,” Amazon said at the time in a memo to sellers, according to Reuters. “In 2022, we expected a return to normalcy as COVID-19 restrictions around the world eased, but fuel and inflation have presented further challenges.”
For the latest hike, Amazon blamed an expected increase in its own operating costs during the peak holiday season, explaining that in the past it had absorbed such costs.
“Seasonal expenses are reaching new heights,” Amazon explained in the e-mail, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Last week, the U.S. Postal Service said it filed a notice to implement a temporary price hike to cover extra handling costs during the holiday season and FedEx announced a similar fee this month.
But at Amazon, seller fees — and their repeated increases — are a subject of contention since the company controls a vast share of the e-commerce market.
Critics argue the company’s excessive fees could potentially lock out merchants from its marketplace.
“Corporations that have monopoly power tend to raise prices, and that’s what we’re seeing here,” said Stacy Mitchell, an Amazon critic and co-director for the anti-monopoly group Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “Amazon’s dominance of the online market means that small businesses have little choice but to pay up.”
Amazon did not comment on the record about the fee increase.
Last month, Amazon’s chief financial officer, Brian Olsavsky, said during a media call that third-party sellers represented 57% of total units sold on Amazon during the three-month period that ended June 30, the highest in the company’s history.
The Seattle-based company’s second-quarter earnings report also showed total revenue Amazon collects from third-party sellers had jumped 13% compared to the prior year, while revenue from its own retail business had declined by 4%.