How Amazon FBA Works: Selling on Amazon US from Turkey

Amazon FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) is the model where you send your stock to Amazon’s warehouses and Amazon packs and ships each order for you. For anyone selling on amazon.com from Turkey, its biggest advantage is this: the product sits in a US warehouse, so it reaches the buyer far sooner than a parcel leaving Turkey would. This guide explains how FBA works, what to sort out when you open an account from Turkey, and how to work out your first product’s profit.

Note: this article is for information only. It is not tax, company or customs advice; make those decisions with an accountant and a customs broker. Amazon’s fees and rules were checked against Amazon’s own pages on 25 October 2026; the sources are listed at the end.

What is Amazon FBA?

The division of work is simple. You find the product, list it on Amazon and send the stock to an Amazon fulfillment center. Amazon receives and stores it; when an order comes in, Amazon picks, packs and ships it, and handles customer service and returns too. Amazon’s FBA page lists these steps and says FBA products are eligible for Prime’s free two-day shipping.

In return Amazon charges two kinds of fees: a referral fee on every sale, and the FBA fees — a fulfillment fee for every unit shipped, a monthly storage fee for the stock waiting in the warehouse, and a few others depending on the case. We go through the 2026 schedule category by category in the referral and FBA fees guide.

FBA versus FBM

With FBM (Fulfillment by Merchant) you ship each order yourself. From Turkey, that means one international parcel per order: delivery takes weeks and returns are expensive. With FBA the stock crosses once, in bulk, and every order then leaves from inside the US. Which one costs less for which product is worked through line by line in FBA or FBM? Trying a product in small numbers first, and growing stock only for the ones that sell, keeps the risk small.

How FBA works, step by step

1. Open an account and turn on FBA. Once your seller account is open, you enable FBA in Seller Central’s account settings.
2. List the product and assign it to FBA. While listing, or later, you choose to have the product fulfilled by Amazon.
3. Send your stock. In Seller Central’s Send to Amazon workflow you create the shipment, label the boxes and ship them to the fulfillment center Amazon names.
4. Amazon receives and stores it. The units that arrive are counted and added to your sellable stock.
5. Amazon ships each order. Picking, packing, delivery, customer service and returns are Amazon’s job.
6. You manage the stock. The FBA dashboard and the restock tools tell you when to send the next batch.

Simple as it looks, the flow has two weak links: Amazon counting fewer units than you sent, and stock sitting in the warehouse longer than you planned. The first is money lost outright, the second is storage fees. We come back to both below.

Selling on amazon.com from Turkey: before you start

Do you need a US company?

No. Amazon Turkey’s “Sell on Amazon US” page says you do not need a company set up in the US to sell on amazon.com, and that the account can be opened through your company in Turkey. Whether you sell as a sole proprietor, a limited company or through a separate US company is a tax and legal question: the export exemption, the VAT refund and the US tax form all depend on it. Settle it with your accountant before you start.

What registration asks for

Amazon’s US seller page lists: a government-issued ID, an email address, an internationally chargeable credit card, a bank account, a business license or registration, proof of residential address from the last 180 days (a bank or credit card statement, for example) and tax information. Identity verification is part of registration. Seller Central shows exactly what it needs for your country and business type during sign-up; names and addresses that match across documents make the check easier.

In the tax information step (Amazon calls it the tax interview), sellers outside the US complete one of the IRS’s forms: W-8BEN is for individuals, W-8BEN-E for entities. Ask your accountant which one fits you.

Which selling plan?

Amazon offers two plans. The Individual plan charges $0.99 per item sold; the Professional plan is $39.99 a month however much you sell. Amazon suggests the Individual plan to new sellers selling fewer than 40 items a month. According to Amazon Turkey’s page, if you already have a Professional account in Europe and link the US to it, you pay a single $39.99 monthly fee for both regions. The plan fee does not replace the referral and FBA fees; it comes on top of them.

How you get paid

Amazon pays your sales proceeds into your registered account at regular intervals. Amazon Turkey lists three routes: a US bank account, your bank account in Turkey, or a payment provider Amazon has approved. Amazon’s global selling guide says a direct transfer to a Turkish bank account is converted into Turkish lira, and providers may charge their own fees. Whichever route you pick, put the exchange spread and the transfer fee into your cost table as a line of their own.

Tax and customs: what a seller in Turkey needs to know

US sales tax is not your cost

Prices on amazon.com are shown without tax; sales tax is added at the buyer’s checkout. In states with marketplace facilitator laws, Amazon calculates, collects and remits that tax on behalf of third-party sellers, and Amazon’s Marketplace Tax Collection page lists the states where it does. So sales tax is not an expense line in your unit profit.

The Turkish side: VAT on exports

Export deliveries to buyers abroad are exempt from VAT under article 11 of Turkey’s VAT Law no. 3065, and, if the conditions are met, the VAT you paid on the goods can be claimed back. How stock sent to FBA is documented for this (customs declaration, invoice, refund file) is a matter of procedure and can differ by company type. The practical rule for your profit math: take the VAT you can reclaim out of product cost, and leave the VAT you cannot reclaim in it.

When you enter a lira invoice as a cost in VeraMargin and type the VAT rate inside it (20%, say), the app takes that VAT out of the cost. If you don’t, it deducts no VAT on its own.

US customs: the $800 exemption is gone

For years, shipments under $800 entered the US free of duty (“de minimis”). That exemption was suspended for every country from 29 August 2025. US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) made the suspension indefinite for everything but international mail in a rule published in June 2026, and the exemption’s legal basis ends on 1 July 2027. In short, low-value shipments from Turkey are dutiable too.

When you send stock to FBA, the import is your responsibility. Amazon’s global selling guide says that when you send inventory to Amazon warehouses in another country, you or your customs broker must act as exporter and importer of record, and that Amazon is not responsible for the duties and fees on FBA inventory. The duty rate depends on the product’s code in the US tariff schedule (HTS) and changed often in 2025–2026 with additional tariffs; check the current rate with your customs broker before every shipment.

In your profit math, duty, freight and prep are spread over the units in that shipment and added to product cost. In VeraMargin, when you enter those invoices against a shipment, they are spread over its units, and each unit sold from that shipment carries its own freight and duty.

Your first product’s profit table

The figures come from a made-up product in VeraMargin’s demo store: a 5-piece set of glass food storage containers, in Home and Kitchen. The price, product cost and FBA fee are the demo store’s; the freight and duty lines are assumptions we added for the example. A real product’s FBA fee depends on its size, weight and price.

Storage, a returns allowance and advertising are not in this table; each one you add makes the profit smaller. The two ratios answer different questions. Margin tells you how much of the sale you keep (11.54 ÷ 39.99). ROI tells you what the money you put into one unit — product cost, freight and duty — earned (11.54 ÷ 15.00). For a seller whose cash is tied up in stock, ROI shows how fast that cash grows; margin shows how much of a price drop you can take. Both are worked through in the profit margin guide.

Now say competition pushes you to $34.99. The referral fee falls to $5.25, but every other cost stays put: net profit drops to $7.29, margin to %20.8 and ROI to %48.6. A %12.5 price cut takes %37 of the profit. That is why the pricing plan belongs in this table before the stock ships.

You don’t have to do this by hand for every candidate. VeraMargin’s Chrome extension shows net profit and ROI on the amazon.com product page and works it out again when you type your cost. See how it works on the Amazon FBA profit calculator page.

Currency: you earn dollars, you pay in lira

Amazon pays you in dollars; your supplier, your forwarder and your accountant usually invoice in lira. Your margin then moves with the exchange rate, and two mistakes are common:

• Converting an old cost at today’s rate. Convert stock you bought in lira three months ago at today’s rate and the profit on its sales changes on paper by itself. A cost should be converted once, at the rate of its own invoice day, and left there.
• Pricing as if the rate will never move. Your dollar cost changes with every new batch; re-check the price each time you buy.

VeraMargin converts a cost you enter in lira once, at the European Central Bank (ECB) rate of the day the cost applies from, and keeps it there for real orders; a later move in the rate never changes the cost of past sales. When you research products it uses today’s rate, because you will pay for stock you haven’t bought yet at today’s rate.

Where profit quietly leaks

1. Taking the referral fee on the wrong base. The fee is a percentage of what the buyer pays in total, not of the item price alone; Amazon says that total includes shipping and gift-wrap charges.
2. Forgetting storage. The monthly storage fee is charged on the space your stock takes and rises in the last quarter of the year. Stock stored more than 181 days also pays an aged inventory surcharge. Sending too much can cost as much as sending too little.
3. Ignoring the peak season. From 15 October 2026 to 14 January 2027 FBA fulfillment fees are on the holiday peak rate, which Amazon says averages $0.32 more per unit. Since 17 April 2026 a %3.5 fuel and logistics surcharge has also been added to fulfillment fees.
4. Not tracking units counted short. Amazon sometimes counts fewer units in a shipment than you sent. You can file a claim in Seller Central, but only within a set period. For a closed shipment, VeraMargin shows the missing units, their cost and the estimated claim window, and writes the case text to paste into Seller Central. You file the claim, and Seller Central’s date is the one that counts.
5. Treating returns as free. When a sale is refunded, Amazon gives the referral fee back minus a refund administration fee; if the unit comes back unsellable, you lose its cost too. Leave a small returns allowance in your price.
6. Mistaking the payout for profit. Amazon’s payout doesn’t deduct your product cost, freight or duty, and it can carry an earlier period’s refunds and fees. Work out profit order by order, not from the payout.

Starter checklist

1. Decide your company structure with your accountant: the export exemption, the VAT refund and the US tax form (W-8BEN or W-8BEN-E) all depend on it.
2. Get the documents ready: ID, proof of address from the last 180 days, business registration, an internationally chargeable credit card and the account you will be paid into.
3. Pick a selling plan: Individual for under 40 sales a month, Professional above that.
4. Build the unit cost of your first products: product, freight to the US, duty, prep, referral fee, FBA fee, storage and a returns allowance.
5. Work with a customs broker and a forwarder that delivers to Amazon’s US warehouses; agree up front who the importer of record is.
6. Keep the first shipment small and compare the units Amazon counts with the units you sent.
7. Once sales start, track the real profit order by order; the gap between estimate and reality sets the price of your next batch.

Is selling on amazon.com.tr different?

Yes. This guide is about amazon.com (US). On amazon.com.tr the buyer is in Turkey; the referral rates, VAT and logistics rules are different, and the current table is on Amazon Turkey’s fees page. VeraMargin’s Chrome extension and Product analysis don’t cover amazon.com.tr; they work on Amazon US, UK, Canada, Australia and the UAE.

Sources

Last checked: 25 October 2026.

• Amazon: Fulfillment by Amazon, what you need to register, selling plans and referral fees
• Amazon Turkey (in Turkish): Sell on Amazon US, Amazon Global Selling guide, amazon.com.tr fees
• Amazon Seller Central announcements: 2026 holiday peak fees, fuel and logistics surcharge
• Tax: Amazon Marketplace Tax Collection, IRS Form W-8BEN, Turkey’s VAT Law no. 3065
• Customs: CBP de minimis release, Federal Register, June 2026 rule, US tariff schedule (HTS)