Here is an example. Say you sell steel water bottles on Amazon and Flipkart, and you ship the orders yourself. The festive sale is on, and orders are coming in on both sites. On Friday night, your last 20 bottles sell on Flipkart. Your Amazon listing still shows 20 in stock, because nobody updated it. By Saturday morning, 12 Amazon orders are waiting for bottles you no longer have.
You will have to cancel those orders. And since August, each cancellation costs you money, on both sites.
Amazon changed its cancellation fee on 17 August 2026. Flipkart started fining sellers for every late or cancelled shipment on 23 August. Here is what each one charges, what triggers it, and how to avoid paying it.
What Amazon charges now
Amazon already charged sellers for cancelling orders. On 17 August, it changed how the fee is worked out. It is now a percentage of the order value:
| Order value | Fee |
|---|---|
| Up to ₹10,000 | 10% |
| ₹10,001 to ₹50,000 | 8% |
| ₹50,001 to ₹1,00,000 | 5% |
| Above ₹1,00,000 | 2% |
GST of 18% is added on top. And there is one detail that Amazon’s announcement left out, but its help page on cancellations includes: if you cancel after the estimated ship date, you pay one and a half times the rate. So a cancelled order under ₹10,000 can cost you 15% of its value, plus GST.
Our own rough maths, from Amazon’s table: on a ₹499 order, cancelling before the ship date costs about ₹59 with GST. Cancelling after the ship date costs about ₹88. (Amazon does not say exactly how it defines order value, so treat these numbers as a guide.)
The fee applies to Easy Ship and Self Ship orders, which leave from your own warehouse. Amazon’s fee table does not list FBA orders, where Amazon ships from its own warehouse.
You pay the fee in two situations. The first is when you cancel an order for any reason other than a buyer’s request. The second is when Amazon cancels the order for you because you did not ship it and confirm it within 24 hours of the estimated ship date.
Only one kind of buyer request is exempt: a cancellation the buyer asks for on the Amazon.in website. If a buyer messages you asking to cancel, and you cancel it for them, it counts against you. Ask the buyer to cancel from their own account instead, under Your Orders, then Request cancellation. And never choose “Buyer cancelled” when the buyer did not ask. Amazon counts that against you too.
The fee is only part of the cost. Amazon wants your cancellation rate under 2%, and under 0.5% for Prime orders. Above 2%, your account can be deactivated. Two cancellations in a row within 30 days can also hide an Easy Ship or Self Ship listing from buyers for a while. To bring it back, edit its price in Manage Inventory.
You can see each fee under Payments, then Transaction View. Set the filter to “Other”, and look for the transaction type “cancellation”.
If a fee was not your fault, for example if the courier never came for the pickup, you can claim a refund. Use the cancellation fee refund form in Seller Central, within 30 days of the cancellation, one order at a time. Amazon checks with the courier before it decides. If it approves the claim, the money comes back within 15 working days. When an Easy Ship pickup fails because of Amazon, you don’t need to claim at all. Amazon refunds those on its own.
One more change: from 7 September, Amazon’s closing fee went up by ₹1 on products priced up to ₹500, and by ₹3 above ₹500. It applies to FBA, Easy Ship and Seller Flex orders.
What Flipkart charges now
Flipkart calls its new charges “Seller Fines”. They started on 23 August 2026:
- ₹30 per shipment if you miss the Dispatch By Date
- ₹60 per shipment if you cancel the order, including orders cancelled automatically after three misses
- ₹90 per shipment if you miss the date and the order is then cancelled
Flipkart’s own video on the fines says no GST is added. The fines replace the old system, where a missed dispatch date could block your account for a while. Sellers in their first three months are exempt, and so are pickups that failed because of the courier. Flipkart says technical and logistics problems don’t attract a fine either.
You can see your missed dates in Seller Hub, under Growth, then NxT Insights, then Business Health. Fines are added up each week and taken out of your Friday payment. They show in the Payment Dashboard under “Services & Fines”. If a fine is wrong, raise a dispute within 30 days of the Dispatch By Date.
The difference between the two sites matters. Flipkart’s fine is the same for every order. Amazon’s fee depends on the order value. On a ₹499 order, the two cost about the same. On a ₹25,000 order, Amazon’s fee is about ₹2,360 before the ship date, while Flipkart’s fine is still ₹60 or ₹90.
Cancellations also hurt your Flipkart seller tier. In Flipkart’s tier rules from October 2025, Silver sellers need a cancellation rate under 0.5%, and Gold sellers under 0.15%. Your tier decides part of your fees and how quickly Flipkart pays you.
How to avoid paying either
Almost every cancellation starts with stock. The website shows stock you don’t really have. So the most useful habit is to keep your stock numbers correct on every site you sell on. Amazon’s own advice is to update your Amazon stock several times a day if you also sell elsewhere. During a sale, we’d check it more often than that.
The rest comes down to a few habits:
- Check your prices before a sale starts. A wrong price brings in orders you will end up cancelling.
- Set handling times you can actually meet, and deliver only to pincodes you can reach on time.
- If you must cancel, do it the same day. On Amazon, cancelling after the ship date costs half as much again.
- Confirm every shipment on time. On Easy Ship, schedule the pickup by 1:45 pm on the ship date.
- On Flipkart, don’t mark holidays during Big Billion Days, and stay open on Sundays so pickups aren’t missed.
- Plan your staff, power, internet and printers for the sale weeks, the way Flipkart suggests.
The big festive sales start on 8 October, and that is when stock goes wrong fastest. Our notes on getting ready for Flipkart’s Big Billion Days cover the rest of the preparation.
Some sellers move their best-selling products to FBA, so that Amazon ships them from its own stock. If you are thinking about that, our FBA shipment checklist explains what Amazon’s warehouses check before they accept your stock.
Where we come in
We manage seller accounts on Amazon and Flipkart, and a large part of that work is exactly this: stock, prices and account health. Our account managers keep stock and prices matching across marketplaces, watch the cancellation rate before it becomes a problem, and raise refund claims when a fee was not the seller’s fault. That is our onboarding and account management service.
Back to the steel bottles. Twelve cancelled orders now cost more than twelve missed sales. Keep your stock numbers correct on every site, especially during the sale.
