New FBA fee discounts reward business pricing, with savings topping $6,000 a year for some sellers
Amazon has made B2B selling meaningfully more profitable with new FBA fulfillment fee discounts for sellers who offer business pricing, and pairing the change with business certification programs can sharpen the advantage further.
The discount, which started September 24, rewards sellers offering at least a 3 percent discount through business pricing or quantity discounts with per-unit FBA fee reductions on multi-unit orders from Amazon Business customers. Only small-standard and large-standard size tiers qualify. The target market is substantial: more than eight million business customers, who on average order 74 percent more units and return 42 percent fewer items than retail shoppers.
The math adds up quickly. A supplement brand offering a 5 percent quantity discount saves 51.50 dollars in fulfillment charges on one 50-unit order. One account reordering monthly is worth 618 dollars a year, and ten such accounts push savings past 6,000 dollars in recovered margin. The first action item for sellers is simply to enable business pricing in Seller Central, a feature that tends to lift sales even before the fee discount.
The second action item is certification. Many business buyers carry mandates requiring a portion of spend to go to businesses owned by minorities, veterans or women, and when they filter by those certifications on Amazon Business, most of the competition disappears. Up to 11 certifications are available, including minority-owned, veteran-owned and women-owned business status, SBA small-business certification and various state designations. With eight million registered business buyers, that filter advantage is one most sellers ignore.
In related traffic news, ChatGPT has become a major referral source for big retailers. SimilarWeb data shows it driving 20 percent of Walmart's referral traffic, up 15 percent since July, over 20 percent of Etsy's, nearly 15 percent of Target's and 10 percent of eBay's, on roughly 50 million shopping queries a day. Amazon is the conspicuous absentee: it blocks AI crawlers, and its ChatGPT referral traffic fell 18 percent in August to under 3 percent, a defensive move protecting an advertising business worth more than 60 billion dollars, since shoppers arriving with high purchase intent click fewer sponsored ads. Amazon is instead betting on its own assistant Rufus, which has fielded more than 500 million shopper questions and now carries built-in advertising. For sellers, the takeaway is that AI referral traffic is high-intent and currently free, though few expect it to stay that way.
Elsewhere, Amazon agreed to a record 2.5 billion dollar settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over claims it steered millions of shoppers into unwanted Prime memberships while making cancellation deliberately hard. Of the total, 1.5 billion dollars goes to customer refunds and one billion to civil penalties, the largest FTC settlement on record. Refunds cover anyone who enrolled in Prime from June 23, 2019 through June 23, 2025 and those who tried unsuccessfully to cancel, roughly 35 million customers, with automatic refunds up to 51 dollars within 90 days and a claims process for others.
The case laid bare internal practices: employees described the subscription flow as a shady world and an unspoken cancer, internal reports from 2017 to 2020 repeatedly flagged customer confusion but fixes were shelved because they slowed subscription growth, and the cancellation flow was nicknamed Iliad internally, after the epic about a long, difficult war. Tactics included checkout buttons promising free two-day delivery that enrolled shoppers in Prime without clear disclosure, buried decline links and a four-page, six-click, 15-option cancellation process. The settlement requires no admission of wrongdoing, but it lands as the strongest signal yet that subscription dark patterns carry real costs.
Finally, the long-awaited TikTok US deal has taken shape, valuing the platform at just 14 billion dollars, well below analyst expectations. The new US joint venture gives American investors 45 percent, with Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-backed MGX at about 15 percent apiece, new and existing ByteDance backers 35 percent, and ByteDance itself capped at 19.9 percent for national security compliance. Analysts calling it possibly the cheapest big tech deal of the decade point to more than 180 million US users and 15 to 20 billion dollars in estimated annual US revenue against a one-times revenue multiple, where Snap trades at 2.5 times, Pinterest at 5.9 times and Reddit at 25.3 times. Reports also suggest ByteDance keeps licensing fees on US revenue generated by its algorithm, worth roughly half of overall US profits, which may explain the low headline price. For brands and marketers, the deal removes the regulatory uncertainty hanging over one of the most powerful advertising platforms.
Also worth noting: a supplement brand scaled past 500 million dollars a year by treating TikTok Shop as a halo channel for Amazon, targeting complementary rather than competitive products and using AI to reach out to 3,000 creators a day, and Temu, which hit 54 billion dollars in 2024 by shipping direct from China and blitzing ads, now tops e-commerce sales in markets including Finland and Slovenia.
