Britain: a 25p minimum, and the categories that escape it
Amazon.co.uk charges a per-item referral minimum of £0.25. Every store sets its own and the currencies do not line up: €0.30 across the euro stores, $0.30 in the United States, C$0.40 in Canada, 3 kr in Sweden and ¥30 in Japan, while Australia and India charge none at all. Converted, Britain's lands in the middle of that list rather than at either end, so the ranking is not the point. What matters is where it bites: at 15%, and on the VAT-exclusive base a registered seller is charged, the minimum overtakes the percentage on anything priced below £2.00, which is most of the cheap end of the catalogue.
Britain is also the only European store here that waives that floor on grocery and gourmet as well as on books, music, video and DVD. Amazon prints "not applicable" against the minimum for those categories, so a low-priced listing in them pays the percentage and nothing more.
Worked example: why cheap items struggle, and where they do not
Take a £1.50 item in a normal British category. Prices here include 20% VAT, so a registered seller's referral base is £1.25 and 15% of that is £0.19, but the £0.25 minimum applies instead. Add the cheapest small-tier fulfilment fee of £1.83 and Amazon's fees are £2.08, more than the item sells for.
The same £1.50 sold as a book pays no minimum, because Amazon marks the floor "not applicable" for books, music, video and DVD. The fee is the £0.19, and the arithmetic is merely bad rather than impossible. Turn the VAT registration toggle off and the base is the full £1.50: the book pays £0.23 and the normal category still pays the £0.25 floor.
The flattest rate card in Europe
The British fulfilment card barely moves with weight. A standard parcel is £2.94 up to 150 g and still only £3.58 at 11.9 kg, and the small tier runs from £1.83 at 20 g to £3.27 at 3.9 kg. Compare France, where the same 400 g standard parcel costs €5.22 against Britain's £3.01.
The practical consequence is that weight is close to irrelevant to British FBA economics and price is not. A heavy product that would be uneconomic in France or Canada can work here, while the category rate and the tax stripped from the price do most of the work in the margin.
Prices on amazon.co.uk include 20% VAT, so a registered seller's referral fee is charged on the price divided by 1.2. Tiered categories are set in pounds rather than converted: clothing steps at £15 and £20, jewellery and watches at £225, and automotive drops from 15% to 9% above £45.
Fulfilment figures come from Amazon's European rate card effective 1 July 2026; referral rates from Amazon's published UK fee schedule.