PSA: You're probably losing 2-3% to hidden FX fees and don't even know it
I've been spending far too much time looking into Amazon fees, PPC, storage, fulfillment, and so on.
Then I started wondering if I’m overlooking another pretty big cost:
currency conversion.
I am selling in the UK and the European Union, and I am paid in Euros and British pounds while my supplier is based in China.
The money basically goes:
Amazon,me,FX conversion,supplier,CNY
If I am charging fees every time the money moves, then I might be paying the FX spread more than once.
At a rate of $5k a month, it might not be a big thing.
But at a rate of $50,000 a month, those small expenses begin to accumulate very quickly.
Want to know how other FBA sellers are dealing with this.
Isn't it just the case that you let Amazon take care of the currency conversion? Do you keep the balances in Euro and Pounds separately? Do you pay the Chinese suppliers directly in CNY or Euros? And do you use some sort of multi-currency account (are they safe)?
I should particularly like to get some feedback from those of you who are achieving sales somewhere in the range of $30k to $100k per month. What exactly are you doing in practice?
It seems to me that many of us put a great deal of effort into optimizing the fees that we can see in Seller Central, while some of the less obvious costs just go unnoticed.