25×.
The product Amazon
fees were crushing.

Situation

Cen-Tec Systems sells industrial vacuum components, including larger-format units that don't fit cleanly into Amazon's standard-tier FBA pricing. One particular SKU — a hero product with strong organic demand — sat in FBA's large or oversize tier depending on Amazon's dimensional-weight calculations. The fee load per unit ate most of the margin Cen-Tec could have generated.

The brand had options on the SKU: stop selling it on Amazon (giving up market visibility); price it high enough to absorb the FBA fees (losing competitiveness on the listing); ship it FBM/SFP and take on the fulfillment burden themselves (operationally heavy for a product line of this scale); or find a different channel architecture.

The brand ran the SKU on FBA at ~10 units/month — a low-volume placement that justified the bare minimum of attention. The economics didn't support investing in PPC for the SKU (the margin per unit wouldn't cover the click cost). The listing existed, the SKU was technically available, but the channel wasn't doing useful work for the product.

Decision

The architectural fix: move the SKU to 1P. Under 1P's wholesale model, Cen-Tec sells the SKU at wholesale to the vendor. The vendor takes title at wholesale, holds the inventory, and resells to Amazon. The FBA fee structure — including the dimensional-weight penalty — is no longer in Cen-Tec's per-unit math; Amazon's fulfillment economics replace it.

The wholesale price Cen-Tec receives is fixed by the wholesale agreement. The retail price on Amazon is set by Amazon's algorithm — typically competitively but not destructively. The net effect on margin per unit: improved. The net effect on unit volume: substantial, because the SKU could now compete in the category at price points the FBA fee load had been blocking.

Selective scope: just this SKU into 1P. The rest of Cen-Tec's catalog stayed on its existing arrangements.

Results

Post-transition, observed within one full cycle of PO velocity: monthly unit volume on the SKU moved from ~10 to 250+. Roughly 25× growth on the same product. The volume came from the SKU finally being competitive on the listing — Amazon's retail price was no longer being pushed into uncompetitive territory by the brand's need to cover FBA dimensional-weight costs.

Margins per unit improved versus the FBA configuration, because the wholesale spread Cen-Tec captures under 1P doesn't carry the same fee load FBA had layered onto the SKU. The brand makes more per unit and sells more units — the rare both-axes improvement that channel-architecture changes occasionally deliver when the unit economics had been the binding constraint.

What this means for similar brands

Cen-Tec's case is the cleanest demonstration of the FBA-fee-escape pattern. The pattern transfers to any SKU with the following characteristics: physical dimensions that trigger FBA's large or oversize tier pricing, or volumetric weight that escalates the per-unit fee; strong underlying product-market fit (the demand exists; the channel was the constraint); margin profile where the FBA fee load is materially eating per-unit economics; a category where the SKU could compete on retail price if the fee structure were different.

The fix is per-SKU. Most brands don't need to move their entire catalog; they need to identify the specific SKUs whose dimensional reality is being punished by FBA and move just those. The Selective engagement model handles this cleanly.

The diagnostic conversation on a discovery call typically takes 15 minutes per SKU candidate: dimensional weight, FBA fee tier, current per-unit margin, comparable-category 1P unit economics. Brands often arrive with a hunch about which SKU is the candidate and we confirm with the math.