The other half of the money.
Recovery claws back what Amazon charged you by mistake. Cost control cuts what they charge you correctly — and unnecessarily. Same account, same data, different question: not "what did they get wrong?" but "what are we paying for that we do not have to?"
Nothing here requires Amazon to agree to anything. These savings do not need approval.
Why this matters more than it used to
Amazon has spent three years turning FBA from a flat fulfillment price into a metered utility. There are now surcharges for holding inventory too long, for holding too little, for sending it to one warehouse instead of four, for products that get returned more than their category average, and for storage in the fourth quarter at roughly triple the normal rate.
Every one of those is avoidable, or at least reducible, by decisions you make before the charge is calculated. And unlike a reimbursement claim, there is no 60-day window, no evidence to submit, and no case handler who might say no. You simply stop paying it.
The charge that doubles while you are not looking
The aged-inventory surcharge is the clearest example of why this needs watching rather than reviewing. It lands on the 15th of every month, as a single line among dozens on a statement nobody reads line by line. It is not a penalty for doing something wrong. It is a bill for time passing.
What makes it dangerous is the shape of it. Units do not age gradually into the surcharge — they cross a boundary and start costing money on a specific day, in a batch, together. A pallet that arrived in one shipment ages as one shipment. So the charge does not creep upward month by month; it sits flat, flat, flat, and then doubles, because a few hundred units crossed 271 days in the same fortnight.
Look at any single month's statement and nothing looks wrong. The number is a number. It is only against the previous three months that it reads as an alarm — and by the time it has doubled, the units causing it have been unsellable at full price for months and the cheap window to clear them has closed.
What we watch instead: the units aged 181–270 days — the ones that have not been surcharged yet and will be. That population is next month's bill, visible today, while discounting or removing them still costs almost nothing. A surcharge you can see coming for ninety days is a decision. One you discover on the statement is just a loss.
The honest comparison: a good recovery month might return a few thousand dollars, once. Moving a high-volume product down one size tier saves on every unit you will ever ship. On our own account, one packaging project is projected at roughly $65,000 a year — around five and a half times the $11,600/yr our claims annualise to over the full period since April — annual against annual, and the more conservative of the two annualisations we publish. It is a projection from measured data, not money banked, and we show the workings.
What we actually do
Each of these runs off data already in your account. No guesswork, no benchmarks from someone else's catalog.
Size tier engineering
We find every SKU sitting just above a size-tier or weight-band boundary and calculate what a small packaging change is worth per unit, per month, per year. Sometimes it is a thinner mailer. Sometimes it is flat-packing. The savings compound on every future unit.
Price-band positioning
Since January 2026, standard-size fulfillment fees depend on your price as well as your box. The same item costs a different amount to fulfill in the under-$10, $10–$50 and over-$50 bands. A SKU priced just above a boundary can net you less per sale than the identical SKU priced slightly lower — so occasionally the right move is to cut the price and keep more. We check every SKU against the boundaries and show you the ones where it pays.
Aged inventory triage
The aged-inventory surcharge steps up in bands the longer stock sits. We watch the cohort approaching each step and tell you, before the charge lands, which SKUs to mark down, bundle, or remove — and which are cheaper to simply keep.
The Q4 storage cliff
October through December, storage rates jump roughly threefold. Inventory that is comfortably profitable to hold in August is expensive to hold in November. We plan the shape of your Q4 inventory in September, not December.
Placement & inbound fees
Amazon charges by how you send inventory: one destination or several, how it is prepped, how it is labelled. We model the trade-off between placement fees and your own freight cost, per shipment, rather than defaulting to whatever the console suggests.
Low-inventory & returns fees
Two newer charges most sellers never diagnose: a fee for running your cover too thin, and a returns processing fee on categories that return above average. Both are influenced by decisions you control — replenishment timing, listing accuracy, sizing information.
Removal vs. hold economics
For every slow SKU there is a crossover point where paying to remove it beats paying to store it. We compute it per SKU with your real costs and sell-through — and we tell you plainly when holding is the right answer.
A quarterly cost review, plus a standing watch
Once your account is connected, cost control is not a project you commission. It runs alongside recovery on the same schedule.
- Monthly: after the aged-inventory surcharge posts, you get an action plan — what to discount, what to remove, what to leave alone, with the dollar consequence of each.
- Quarterly: a size-tier sweep across your catalog, ranked by units sold, so the packaging work you do is the packaging work that pays.
- Seasonally: a Q4 plan built in September, when you can still act on it, using your own category demand history.
- Continuously: when Amazon changes a rate or introduces a fee, we tell you what it does to your specific catalog — in dollars, not in policy language.
What this costs. Cost control is included for recovery clients. We do not bill a percentage of "savings" — that number is too easy to invent, and a service that profits from a projection it wrote itself has bad incentives. You pay 10% of money we actually recover. The cost work is how we keep the account worth having.
What we will not tell you
We will not tell you to gut your packaging protection to save eleven cents. Damaged-in-transit units cost more than the fee you saved, and the damage lands on your account health, not ours.
We will not tell you to remove inventory that is selling. Removal is a tool for dead stock, not a reflex.
And we will not present a projection as a fact. When we say a change is worth a number, we show the arithmetic and label the assumptions, so you can disagree with it.
Find out what both halves are worth.
The free audit covers recovery and a first pass at your cost structure — the SKUs closest to a cheaper tier, and what your aged inventory is about to cost you.