> "When you say "ship at the negotiated rates" that Amazon has access to, it's really hard to interpret that as anything but the amazon warehouse rate." Who ne

> "When you say "ship at the negotiated rates" that Amazon has access to, it's really hard to interpret that as anything but the amazon warehouse rate." Who negotiates the rates that are available on "Buy Shipping"? I could've been clearer, and added the "Buy Shipping" name specifically, so sorry for any confusion. My point is simply that an Amazon merchant who wants to sell with a Prime badge previously had no such access to shipping discounts. Now they do. > Backing down to "some negotiated rate that Amazon has, but not even close to the best one", is a very different beast. At no point did I say this. UPS has gross margins of ~8%, FedEx of ~20%. Any discount off sticker price is going to affect those gross margins significantly, so the discounts that SFP merchants have access to are very meaningful ones. Assuming that you accept my premise that "Buy Shipping" rates are up to 20% better than the rates available to even a volume shipper, a SFP merchant now has rates that are much closer to Amazon's own shipping costs than their previous rate. So no, SFP merchants do get rates that are much closer "to the best one". Amazon's own rate < SFP rates < "sticker/market" rates, and the delta between SFP and market is much larger than between Amazon's own rate and SFP.