Amazon Business (B2B on Amazon)
There is no separate fee for selling on Amazon Business. A business order pays the same referral fee, the same FBA fulfilment and storage fees, and the same monthly Professional plan subscription as a consumer order, calculated on whatever the business buyer actually paid after your business price and quantity tiers. The three things that are specific to B2B are a reduced referral rate that Amazon applies in some categories to the part of a large business order above a threshold, an optional fee to be paid sooner on Pay by Invoice orders, and the requirement to be on the Professional plan to use any of the business features at all.
Everything else about your fee bill on a business order is a consequence of the lower price you chose to sell at, and that is where the arithmetic gets interesting.
The Professional plan is the entry ticket
Business prices, quantity discounts, tax exemption enrolment, Pay by Invoice and B2B Central are all Professional plan features. If you are on the Individual plan, none of it is available, and the monthly subscription is the first B2B fee you pay. For any seller doing more than a few dozen orders a month that decision was made long ago, but it is worth stating for a brand that runs a second, smaller account.
The referral fee: same schedule, lower base
The referral fee is a share of the item price plus any shipping charge, taken per unit, at the rate for your category, subject to a per-item minimum in many categories. It does not care whether the buyer is a business. It cares what they paid.
So when you set a business price below your consumer price, or a tier that goes lower still, the referral fee shrinks with the price. That is a small relief that softens each discount step. Take a $30 consumer price in a category with a standard rate: the referral fee is $4.50. At a $27.50 business price it is about $4.13. At a $25 tier price it is $3.75. The discount you gave was $5, and Amazon absorbed $0.75 of it through the lower referral fee. The rest came from you.
The per-item minimum is where this stops helping. On a low-priced product the calculated fee at a deep tier can fall below the minimum, at which point you pay the minimum and every further dollar of discount is yours alone. Check the fee preview at the tier price, not the business price, before you set a tier on anything under about $10.
The reduced referral rate on large business orders
In some categories Amazon charges a lower referral rate on the portion of a single business order's item value above a threshold. The idea is to make large B2B orders viable in categories where the standard rate would make them uneconomic for the seller. Which categories, which thresholds and which reduced rates are set out in the referral fee schedule and change from time to time, so look at the schedule for your category rather than assuming.
Two things to know. It applies per order, to the amount above the threshold, not to the whole order; a $1,200 order with a $1,000 threshold gets the reduced rate on $200. And it applies only to business orders, which means a large consumer order of the same size pays the full rate. For a seller whose business buyers place big orders in a qualifying category, this can make a top tier viable that would otherwise sit below the floor. For most sellers it never triggers, and it should not be the basis of a tier table.
FBA fees: unchanged and the biggest drag
The FBA fulfilment fee is per unit, based on size and weight, and it is identical on a business order. Multi-unit orders of a single ASIN sometimes get a modest per-unit reduction in some size bands because they ship together, but treat that as a bonus you confirm in the fee preview, not as a planning assumption.
This is the fee that makes deep quantity discounts dangerous. Your landed cost is fixed. The referral fee shrinks with the price. The FBA fee does not move at all. On a $27.50 business price for a product with a $5.40 FBA fee and a $9.40 landed cost, you have $12.70 before the referral fee; drop to a $24 tier and you have $9.20 before referral. The FBA fee has gone from about a fifth of the price to nearly a quarter, and it will keep growing as a share with every tier you add. The tier design that keeps this in check is worked in quantity discounts for sellers.
Storage fees are also unchanged, though business buyers who order in larger quantities turn inventory faster, which lowers storage per unit sold and reduces the chance of aged inventory surcharges. That is a real, if small, effect in your favour.
Pay by Invoice: free unless you want your money sooner
When a business buyer uses Pay by Invoice, Amazon extends them terms and you are paid when they pay or when the invoice is due. There is no fee for this. Amazon carries the credit risk.
If you would rather be paid on your normal settlement schedule, Amazon offers a paid faster option, charged per order as a small share of the order value. Whether to take it is a cash flow decision. If the money would otherwise sit idle, do not pay. If it would fund a production run that is due before the invoice is, compare the fee to whatever else you would borrow at. How the terms work, and how they compare to net 30 with a retailer, is in Amazon Business net terms.
A worked example: one business order, all in
A plausible product: a 1-litre stainless steel water bottle, consumer price $28, business price $26, 12-plus tier at $24. Landed cost $8.50. Standard referral rate. FBA fee $6.10. A cafe orders 12 on Pay by Invoice.
Sale: 12 units at $24, $288.
Referral fee: $3.60 per unit, $43.20. The category has no reduced large-order rate and the order is nowhere near a threshold anyway.
FBA fulfilment: $6.10 per unit, $73.20. Assume no multi-unit reduction.
Storage prorated over the units, about $0.10 per unit, $1.20.
Inbound freight spread over the units, about $0.40 per unit, $4.80.
Landed cost: $8.50 per unit, $102.
Payment: you wait up to 30 days, or pay for faster disbursement. Assume you wait, at no cost.
Net: $288 minus $43.20 minus $73.20 minus $1.20 minus $4.80 minus $102 is $63.60, or $5.30 per unit. Against a $28 consumer sale of the same bottle, where net is about $7.50 per unit after a slightly higher referral fee and per-unit ad cost, the business order gave up around $2.20 per unit to win twelve units in one order with no ad spend and a likely reorder.
Now the same twelve bottles to a store at $14 wholesale: $168 in revenue, no referral, no FBA, about $12 to ship a case, $102 landed, net $54 or $4.50 per unit, paid whenever the store pays. On this one order Amazon Business nets more. Over a year of that store reordering and referring the next store, the wholesale channel usually nets more, for reasons that have nothing to do with fees and everything to do with who does the selling.
Fees to watch as business orders grow
Three things creep.
The referral minimum at your lowest tier on low-priced products; audit it once when you set tiers and again whenever Amazon updates the schedule.
The business Buy Box. Losing it to another seller with a lower business price does not cost a fee, it costs the order, and sellers often respond by cutting the tier below the floor. Check the fee preview before every such cut. Where the business price sits and how it is chained to the consumer price is in setting business prices.
The Pay by Invoice balance. It is not a fee, but it is money you cannot use yet, and it grows with business sales. Watch it in the payments dashboard and decide in advance at what level the faster disbursement becomes worth its cost.
None of these fees is a reason to avoid Amazon Business. It is the highest-margin unit you will sell and it costs no labour. They are a reason to run the numbers at the tier price before you save it, and a reason to remember that the fee-free channel, the one where a store pays $14 and you keep everything but the shipping, requires you to find the store. To see which stores and distributors that would be for your bottle, paste the listing into WholesalePilot and look at the preview.