What the Amazon currency converter costs your margin
Sell half a million dollars a year on Amazon.com from a UK company, take the payout in sterling, and Amazon charges 1.50% to convert it. That's $7,500 a year, and Amazon tells you about it. It's on the fee schedule, it's in the tier table, it shows up in your payments dashboard.
It's also the smaller of the two numbers, and it's the only one you can find.
What the Amazon currency converter actually charges
Amazon Currency Converter for Sellers is priced in bands, off your cross-currency proceeds over the trailing twelve months across all Amazon stores. For a UK seller taking sterling it's 1.50% up to $500,000, 1.25% to a million, 1.00% to ten million, and 0.75% above that.
Worth knowing the bands exist, because a seller who crosses $500,000 and doesn't notice the rate should have dropped has no reason to check. Amazon's marketing page and its Seller Central help page currently disagree about the tiers, which tells you how closely either is maintained.
The number underneath the number
Here's the part that matters. The 1.50% is a service fee. It is not the exchange rate.
Amazon's own terms for the service say the conversion happens at “the exchange rate applied by our third party service provider at the time we initiate the Disbursement”, and that this rate “incorporates and reflects all fees and charges for payment in the currency you select”. Read that twice. The rate has charges baked into it, and the service fee sits on top.
How much is baked in? Amazon doesn't say. There's no published margin, no named benchmark, and no third party identified. What Amazon does publish is a line gently heading off the obvious question: exchange rates you see quoted in the media “typically reference inter-bank rates”, and Amazon “works with bank service providers to ensure that our sellers receive a competitive exchange rate.”
Competitive against what isn't stated. On $500,000 of US revenue, every extra half a percent sitting inside that rate is another $2,500 a year, and there is no page anywhere on Amazon that will tell you whether it's there.
Stripe and Shopify do it differently
This is why the headline percentages don't compare.
Shopify Payments charges a UK store 2% to convert, and says plainly that the conversion rate itself “isn't a fee (it's a mid-market rate, without any markup)”. Stripe adds 2% where conversion is required, on top of 3.15% plus 20p for an international card, and states that currencies “are generally converted at the mid-market rate”. Both name the benchmark. Both disclaim a markup on the rate. You can check them, which is more than can be said for the mid-market rate as a marketing phrase in general.
So the cheapest headline number in this market belongs to the only one of the three that won't tell you the rest of it.
One thing to watch on Shopify. On 6 April 2026 the conversion fee moved from being calculated on the net order amount to the gross. The stated rate didn't change. The amount taken went up, and Shopify's own note says the point was that “your effective currency conversion rate matches exactly your stated rate”.
A caveat on all of this: not one of the pages these figures come from carries a date. All three publish fee schedules with no last-updated stamp, which is why everything here is stated as at 29 September 2026 and worth re-checking before you act on it.
How to be paid in dollars instead
You don't have to convert on the platform at all, and Amazon's own terms tell you how to stop.
The route out is a bank account in the marketplace's currency. Amazon puts it in writing: to leave the converter, “you must first update the information for Your Bank Account to include a bank account for which the local currency is the same as the currency of the Amazon Site.” Amazon publishes no fee for paying you in dollars to a dollar account. It publishes a fee for converting.
The trap is location, not denomination. A USD account at a UK bank will not do it. Amazon's rule is where the bank sits: “if your bank account is located in the UK, then disbursements can only be made in GBP, even if your bank account is capable of accepting deposits in both GBP and EUR.” You need a US-located dollar account, or one from a provider on Amazon's approved payment service provider list. Expect a hold of up to 14 days on the first payout after you change the details. We've written before on what specialist FX actually does for an Amazon seller, and this is the mechanical half of it.
Shopify and Stripe sell you the exit rather than giving it to you. Shopify's Multi-Currency Payouts exist only on Advanced and Plus, and cost a UK store 1.5% or 1% of payout volume, so you swap a 2% conversion fee for a 1.5% payout fee. Stripe's multi-currency settlement is 1% of payout volume. Better than 2%, but not nothing.
Once the dollars are yours, converting them becomes a decision you make on your own timetable rather than the platform's. That's the bit we do: physical delivery, you hold the currency, you convert when it suits the business, and there are other places the cost of an international payment hides that are worth a look at the same time. Pathfinder isn't directly authorised by the FCA. We work through FCA authorised partners and it's those partners who hold and safeguard client money, so the firm to look up is the partner, and we'll name it first.
An unpublished number is not automatically a large one. But you're running a business on a margin you can calculate to two decimal places everywhere except the bit where your dollars become pounds, and the only party who knows what that costs is the one taking it.
Get in touch
If you sell in dollars and get paid in pounds, it takes about ten minutes to work out what that's costing you. Give us a ring.
Pathfinder FX
1 Knights Court, Archers Way, Battlefield Enterprise Park, Shrewsbury, SY1 3GA
+44 (0)1743 290955
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