Amazon Sellers Plagued by Unknown Other Fees

Amazon said it's investigating reports from sellers who say they're being charged "other" fees for which they cannot account. A seller emailed us 2 weeks ago about a problem she was experiencing - "I sell books on Amazon and today I was hit with a (dollar-amount redacted) "other" fee, no explanation. No returns, no cancelations, etc."

She said she wasn't the only seller experiencing the issue, although the amount of the "other" fees varied, with some in the hundreds of dollars. 

An Amazon moderator who responded in a thread about the issue on August 25th pointed to a page, "Understanding Your Amazon Statement View: A Quick Guide" and included the following excerpt:

"We are often asked for more details about the "Other" categories on the Statement View. These sections collect different transaction types that are often shown in detail on the Transaction View. For example: prepaid return labels are shown on the Statement View as an 'Other' expense but in the Transaction View as "Transaction type: Shipping services / Product Details: Billing for return postage." To view the individual transactions covered on the Statement View, click the "View transactions for this period" link, Download the transactions, then sort the results by Transaction type and Product Details. For additional instructions on this topic, check out the Download payment reports help page."

We reached out to Amazon for information and included a link to the discussion post; a spokesperson provided us with the following response:

"Our selling partners are incredibly important to us, and we work hard to help them grow their businesses. We are actively investigating this matter and will communicate with affected sellers as appropriate."

At about the same time, the Amazon moderator updated the discussion post with the following response:

Hello to all sellers asking questions about "Other Charges:

Our teams are actively investigating reports of this issue to fully understand the scope and determine any required next steps. While we don't have a comprehensive update yet, we want to assure you this is being investigated as a priority.

We will provide updates as soon as new information becomes available. Thank you for surfacing this concern.

Sellers who experienced the issue expressed frustration that they couldn't determine the exact reason for the charges, which further complicated their bookkeeping and tax reporting records. 

Another reader who reached out to us on September 21 with the same issue said they had spent over 4 hours on the phone talking to Amazon's experts, and they were unable to tell him what the charge were for, although one of the emails he received said in part, "We have identified that these charges are related to USPS adjustments, but we are working with our internal teams to get more detailed information to provide you with a complete explanation."

But he told us, "I only ship single books on Amazon with media mail like I have done since 2005 and have never had a post office adjustment before that I can remember. This charge showed up on my account on 9-10-25, it has been 11 days and no one can even tell me what it is for. This is totally unacceptable."

He later wrote to inform us he had downgraded his account and planned to close it.

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