What STEP is, and why Amazon will not tell you
Amazon India's own fee schedule says weight handling fees are revised based on your applicable STEP level, and then never defines STEP, names no levels and explains no progression. The same parcel costs a different amount depending on a programme the public page refuses to describe.
STEP is Amazon India's seller tiering programme, and your tier changes your weight handling fee. Amazon's public fee schedule references it and defines it nowhere. Measured from Amazon's own rate-card images, the first 500g on Easy Ship costs INR 53 at Premium and Advanced, INR 55 at Standard and INR 59 at Basic. Nothing public tells you how to move between them.
- Amazon's fee schedule says fees are revised basis applicable STEP level, then never defines STEP or names a level.
- The same 500g Easy Ship parcel is INR 53, 55 or 59 depending on tier, before 18% GST.
- The numbers live only in un-alt-texted JPEGs on a page that is robots-blocked and absent from Amazon's sitemap.
- Your reserve period is also tier-linked, which is cash flow rather than cost.
- There is no public document explaining how to move up a tier, so treat any blog that claims one as unsourced.
Amazon India's fee schedule states that weight handling fees have been revised basis applicable STEP level and points you at tables below. It then never states what STEP is, names no levels and explains no progression.
The sentence Amazon leaves unfinished
Amazon India's fee schedule states that weight handling fees have been revised basis applicable STEP level and points you at tables below. It then never states what STEP is, names no levels and explains no progression between them. A seller reading the authoritative fee document cannot work out which number applies to them.
That is not an oversight on a minor page. Weight handling is the largest variable cost on most Easy Ship orders, so the tier decides your unit economics. And the document itself is unusually hard to reach: it is disallowed in Amazon's robots.txt, absent from its sitemap, and not linked from the fees page that is supposed to lead to it.
What the tiers actually cost
Transcribed from Amazon's own rate-card images, effective 16 March 2026, first 500g on Easy Ship: Premium and Advanced INR 53, Standard INR 55, Basic INR 59. Every one of those is quoted before GST, and Amazon's fees page states plainly that all fees are displayed excluding GST with 18% applied on top.
The gap looks small per parcel and is not small per year. Six rupees a parcel at 40 orders a day is roughly INR 87,000 a year, which is more than most small sellers spend on anything else they actively manage.
A warning about those figures: they were read off images rather than text, because that is the only form Amazon publishes them in. Check them against your own settlement report before you plan around them, which is what our guide to the 24 settlement fields is for.
What nobody can tell you, honestly
There is no public Amazon document describing how a seller moves between STEP levels. Not a vague one, none. So any article telling you the exact metrics and thresholds either had access to a logged-in page or made it up, and the second is far more common.
What is visible is that the tier is referenced alongside performance language, and that settlement reserve periods differ by tier, so the programme touches cash flow as well as cost. Beyond that, the honest answer is that Amazon has not said.
Where this sits in the rest of your Amazon operation
Robnu is read-only on Amazon today: orders, returns, payouts and inventory sync so you can see and reconcile them, and it cannot accept Amazon orders or make their labels. Order processing is live for AJIO and Meesho. Related reading:
Sources & further reading
- Amazon India fees and pricing states that all fees are displayed excluding GST and that 18% GST is applied to them, and references the STEP level without defining it.
- Amazon India Easy Ship the public product page, which carries no fee figures at all.
Not legal or tax advice. Amazon changes fees, windows and policies without notice, and several of the figures here changed during 2026. Check anything you plan to act on against your own Seller Central account or settlement report first.
Questions sellers ask
Amazon's public fee schedule references the STEP level without expanding the acronym or defining the programme anywhere a search engine can read. It is a seller tiering programme whose level changes your weight handling fee and your settlement reserve period. Anyone publishing a confident expansion of the acronym with a source is quoting a logged-in page; anyone publishing one without a source is guessing.
On the first 500g of an Easy Ship parcel, transcribed from Amazon's own rate-card images effective 16 March 2026: INR 53 at Premium and Advanced, INR 55 at Standard, INR 59 at Basic, all before 18% GST. The spread widens on heavier parcels. At 40 orders a day a six-rupee difference is roughly INR 87,000 a year.
Amazon publishes no document explaining it. That is the honest answer and it is unsatisfying. What is observable is that the programme sits alongside performance language, so the levers that matter everywhere else on Amazon, dispatching on time, keeping your Late Dispatch Rate under 4% and your Valid Tracking Rate above 95%, are the only ones anyone can point at with evidence.
Inside Seller Central, not on any public page. The fee schedule that references the level is itself disallowed in Amazon's robots.txt and absent from its sitemap, so a prospective seller cannot check what any of it means before registering.
Yes. Settlement reserve periods differ by tier, so the programme is a cash-flow mechanism as well as a cost one. Standard tier sellers report a seven-day reserve after delivery. That interacts with the rest of the payment cycle, which is its own tangle.
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