To hear some small business sellers tell it, Amazon just isn’t what it used to be.

Long known as an online marketplace where entrepreneurs could jumpstart new businesses with relative ease and maybe make a fortune, the Seattle-based e-commerce behemoth has ratcheted up its fees for such sellers so much that some say they’re being forced to branch out–to the likes of TikTok, Walmart.com, Target Plus, and other Amazon competitors. Many e-commerce veterans are also launching their own websites and experimenting with direct-to-consumer sales, including through platforms like Shopify.

That’s because Amazon, particularly over the last few years since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, has been slowly but steadily introducing more and more fees for such independent sellers, to the point where some now remit more than 50 cents from every dollar in revenue back to the online giant.

That’s according to Eugene Khayman of Million Dollar Sellers, a loosely organized trade group of about 700 independent sellers who operate on Amazon. For context, there are more than 75,000 independent sellers that had more than $1 million in revenue on Amazon in 2025, according to the company site.

Khayman said when he first began selling items on Amazon in 2011, those same fees ate up about 35 cents of every dollar of revenue. The increase is what has driven a lot of e-commerce veterans to explore other online markets, he said.

“The fees are really the core issue,” Khayman said, adding that he knows some Amazon merchants who have had to pay Amazon 60 or 70 cents on the dollar from their revenue streams. “And the growth of those fees, not keeping up with the growth of the marketplace is the issue. That’s causing a downward curve of new sellers and success stories.”

One such 3.5% surcharge for sellers was just introduced in early April, ostensibly to offset fuel and logistics cost hikes due to the war in Iran. The fee went into effect April 17. There are plenty of other fees levied on independent sellers, such as basic selling plan fees, referral fees, fulfillment fees, storage fees and more.

The pushback began immediately after the surcharge was imposed, first with a boycott of Amazon ads and then with an organized campaign by Khayman and others, called Save Our Sellers. Khayman said Amazon has engaged with the Save Our Sellers campaign, which is asking the online marketplace to consider rolling back some of its newer fees for sellers.

A spokesperson for Amazon said in an emailed statement that the company’s “success is directly tied to that of our selling partners - when they succeed, Amazon and our customers benefit - and we’re investing more than ever in supporting seller growth."

“Most sellers tell us they choose to sell in Amazon’s store because of the great value it provides,” the spokesperson wrote. “Amazon continues to foster these relationships by inventing and innovating on behalf of its selling partners. More than 60% of sales in Amazon’s store are from independent sellers - most of whom run small and medium-sized businesses.”

Amazon further told Forbes that it holds roundtables with sellers on a regular basis, to take feedback on any issues sellers may be encountering.

But Khayman doesn’t have the same rosy view of the situation. He and other sellers insisted to Forbes that ballooning fees aren’t just affecting their profitability and survival; they suggested it could hurt Amazon, too, if the company doesn’t take seriously the unhappiness of its entrepreneurial base and the movement of third-party sellers to other platforms.

“The true problem is (sellers) can’t find growth,” Khayman said. “The new growth is not on Amazon… It’s a survive or die kind of thing. So the new growth is coming from other platforms, really.”

Khayman shared results from a survey conducted among 185 members of Million Dollar Sellers, who all have products for sale on Amazon, which asked what these businesses had already done–and planned to do– because of increased Amazon fees. The survey found that 45% of members, or 85 respondents, had already begun shifting towards Shopify and direct to consumer (DTC) sales over the past year, while 40%, or 74 respondents, had already begun selling on TikTok during the same timeframe.

Even more sellers said they’re looking to expand to TikTok and Walmart in the future if they don’t get relief on fees.

Daniel Crackower, a Louisiana-based beauty product seller who’s been on Amazon since 2015 with his brand Eva Naturals, said he’s actively planning on spreading out his retail footprint this year to TikTok, Walmart and possibly some other e-commerce sites because his company revenue is down so much that he was forced to lay off five of his 13 employees early this year. That’s largely due, he said, to Amazon fee increases.

“A lot of sellers recently have been saying that they’ve doubled or even tripled their revenue through viral traffic on TikTok,” Crackower said. “So we’re definitely this year going back on that, trying to get some attention and sales and do marketing on that platform.” He is also planning to invest more into his own website, www.evanaturals.com.

Crackower said that though Amazon helped him move from a middle-class job making $50,000 a year to occasionally netting $50,000 a month, the bottom line is that having a presence on Amazon is no longer enough to pay the bills.

“We looked at side-by-side comparisons of our P&L from 2021 through our most recent, and Amazon’s share after fees and costs for pay-per-click ads went from something like 55% back then to the most recent is like 68% of every dollar goes to them,” he said. “It’s a huge percentage… It’s kind of like death by a thousand paper cuts.”

Both Crackower and Khayman emphasized that they’re both still grateful to Amazon for helping them get their e-commerce businesses off the ground, and that they don’t want to villainize the online giant. But they added that the status quo won’t work long-term anymore, either for sellers like them or for Amazon. “It’s about helping Amazon save itself,” Khayman said. “That’s really our goal.”

Another member of Save Our Sellers, Jon Jewett, said he joined the campaign as a way to “draw attention to Amazon getting away from its roots, which was creating the most dynamic selling platforms around that brings together small, medium and large businesses” to provide value for both companies and customers alike.

Jewett, who didn’t begin selling his family’s aloe vera products from China on Amazon until 2020, said his business “took off immediately” when he joined the platform, and quickly skyrocketed into a seven-figure business. But, Jewett said, Amazon’s fees have become a “huge burden.”

Jewett wrote in an email to Forbes that if he’d gotten onto Amazon just two years earlier, “We would be mid- to high-8-figures in the U.S. by this point. If we had started two years later, we probably wouldn’t have made it across the Rubicon due to significant barriers to entry such as advertising requirements and Amazon’s escalating fee structure.”

As it stands, Jewett wrote, he’s exploring getting his aloe vera products up for sale on TikTok, Walmart and Shopify, to supplement his Amazon sales.

“TikTok and Walmart offer free account management and actually help us, vs. Amazon’s SaaS program, which is just another way to squeeze a percent off sellers,” Jewett wrote.

That speaks to another trend Khayman and others warned about, which is that new entrants to the e-commerce space essentially now can’t afford to only have a presence on Amazon, which is a 180-degree-flip from how hospitable the site was for entrepreneurs a decade ago.

“I don’t even think we as an established business making millions of dollars [of sales] a year can just rely on Amazon anymore, much less a newcomer,” said Crackower. “We have to try to make TikTok work. We have to try to make our own e-commerce work. It just doesn’t seem optional anymore… You have to not just be on Amazon.”

Save Our Sellers has provided Amazon its survey data about its members' moves to other platforms in the hopes it will convince the retail giant to roll back its fee hikes to some degree.

“It’d be nice to have one year without new fees or policies to give it a little time to normalize,” Khayman said, adding he hopes that Amazon executives understand that Save Our Sellers wants to work with the company, not against it. “That’s, I would say, a hope of the campaign.”

Klayman conceded that while members of Million Dollar Sellers have tried a variety of alternatives to Amazon, it’s not easy to survive without being on a platform as dominant as Amazon. He said a lot of sellers have launched their own new brand websites, in an attempt to reach consumers directly, instead of relying on Amazon as the middleman, but that brings with it all sorts of new challenges involving marketing.

That’s part of the appeal of TikTok, Khayman said, which has “really blown up” with all types of new product categories available for sale on its marketplace. “More and more categories are becoming successful on TikTok,” Khayman said. “It used to be all beauty products, and now it’s like we’re selling tech pillows, baby pillows, people are selling baby stuff. It’s a whole litany of categories.”

TikTok also is routing more customers to brand websites, Khayman said, which is further boosting direct-to-consumer sales channels for independent sellers who are discontent with Amazon.

“When you do well on TikTok, you have a better chance of success at retail, a better chance of success at DTC. And Amazon is still there, but Amazon just becomes kind of your cash register, because you’re no longer dependent on it,” Khayman said. “You build other channels, you have a strong customer base and you don’t need to focus on it, like, ‘Hey, what’s going to be my next Amazon product?’”

TikTok at this point is also more “welcoming” of new sellers than Amazon, Khayman added, providing free account managers who aim to drive up revenue for sellers. By contrast, he said, Amazon’s relations with sellers focus more on getting them to spend on advertising, instead of providing business support.

“Internally, [TikTok] is doing a lot of the right things, which is teaching sellers how to succeed on their platform and providing a lot of resources,” Khayman said. “If a brand is large, they’re like wining and dining those brands onto their platform. Amazon has never wined and dined anybody.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated to correct the number of Amazon merchants in Save Our Sellers.

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