Amazon Global Logistics (AGL): What It Covers, How You Get Charged, and When a Freight Forwarder Is Cheaper

Amazon Global Logistics is Amazon acting as your freight forwarder on a fixed set of lanes: China, Hong Kong and Vietnam out, Amazon’s own facilities in seven countries in. You book it inside Seller Central, you get a quote before you commit, and the freight cost is later deducted through your seller account rather than invoiced by a carrier. What Amazon does not publish is a rate card — so nobody can tell you in advance whether AGL beats an independent forwarder on your lane. This guide sets out what the service actually covers, the mechanics of how the money leaves your account, and the variables that decide the answer. Every source below was checked on 2026-08-16, and no rate figures are quoted, because Amazon publishes none.

Picking and vetting an independent forwarder is a separate job with its own checklist: see Amazon FBA freight forwarders. This page is about the other option — letting Amazon do it.

What Amazon Global Logistics Actually Covers

AGL is a door-to-door programme, not a booking marketplace. Amazon’s programme page describes what you pay for as covering “pickup at origin, export declaration, cross-border ocean and air freight transportation, destination customs clearance, and delivery to Amazon fulfillment centers or warehousing facilities” (sell.amazon.com, checked 2026-08-16). Three constraints define it more usefully than the marketing does.

The lane list is closed. Amazon’s FAQ answer is exact: “We currently ship from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Vietnam to the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan.” If your goods originate in India, Turkey or Mexico, AGL is not an option and the rest of this comparison is moot.

The destination list is Amazon’s own network. The same FAQ describes shipping “directly from mainland China, Hong Kong, or Vietnam to US, UK, EU, and Japan fulfillment centers … or ship directly to an AWD facility in the US” — its fulfilment centres and its Amazon Warehousing and Distribution facilities. A forwarder, by contrast, delivers wherever you say.

The service menu is fixed but broad. Amazon lists “Standard Ocean FCL and LCL, Fast Ocean FCL and LCL, and air freight,” with “end-to-end solutions including local pickup, palletization, labeling, cargo insurance service, and customs clearance at origin and destination.” Air is stated as arriving “within 7-10 days.” Customs is in-house: “Yes, we provide customs brokers to expedite customs clearance at the origin and the destination.” One eligibility gate applies — “Amazon Global Logistics requires enrollment in Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA).”

How You Actually Get Charged

This is the part sellers get wrong, and it is the part Amazon documents least.

You remain the importer of record. Amazon’s own AGL onboarding guide — a PDF Amazon hosts, carrying a 2020 copyright line — states plainly: “To submit shipments, you must have an IOR and continuous bond for cross-border customs clearance.” Amazon does not import on your behalf. What it does do is broker the paperwork: the guide walks through requesting a Customs Assigned Importer Number if you have no EIN, and buying a continuous bond, where “A quote for a one-year continuous bond will appear. The purchase will be completed at the time of your first booking.” That is convenient, and it does not move the customs liability off your company. Note the bond sizing question: Amazon asks for the number of annual imports by the IOR entity, “not only Amazon-related imports for the company, but all imports throughout the year.”

The money comes out of your seller balance, not off an invoice. The same guide: “USD is the default payment method for your Seller Central account,” and if you pay in USD, “you’re ready to use your Seller Central disbursement account. No additional information is required.” Chinese entities can instead elect CNY and receive a fapiao, “a legal receipt that provides proof of purchase for goods and services.” Duties can optionally be routed to a pre-existing ACH account with US Customs and Border Protection.

The charges surface as two service-fee lines. In Amazon’s own seller forums, AGL freight is identified as arriving under the labels FBA International Freight Shipping Charge and FBA International Freight Duties and Taxes Charge, in the Payments dashboard under the Transaction View tab filtered to Service Fees. We could not verify these labels against a signed-in Seller Central help article — those pages return a login shell to any automated fetch — so the corroboration here is Amazon’s public forum, not its help centre.

And the opacity is documented, by sellers, on Amazon’s own platform. One thread is titled, verbatim, “AGL fees completely opaque. Cannot determine what i’m being charged”; the complaint is that no itemised invoice arrives and the cost is netted out of disbursements. In a second thread a seller asked where to find a breakdown of an FBA International Freight Shipping Charge, and the Amazon representative who replied could not review the charge and referred them to Seller Support (both checked 2026-08-16). That is sellers’ reported experience, not Amazon policy — but two independent threads pointing the same way is a planning input.

Build your landed-cost model from the quote you accepted at booking, not the deduction you see later, and reconcile the two. Amazon FBA fees and profit covers the downstream side.

What Amazon Publishes, and What It Does Not

Amazon does publish rate cards. The one on its supply chain site is titled “Multichannel fulfillment fees” and dated “As of June 1, 2026” — and a full-text search of it returns zero occurrences of freight, ocean, air freight or container (checked 2026-08-16). There is no equivalent published document for AGL freight. The only price commitment on the programme page is a promotion: “get an 8% discount on base ocean freight rates for 60 days after onboarding,” qualified as “Available exclusively for new FBA sellers when they create a profile with Amazon Global Logistics. Terms and conditions may vary.” An 8% discount on an unpublished base rate tells you nothing about the base rate.

One correction worth making, because the page layout invites the error: the “3.5% fuel and logistics-related surcharge” and the holiday peak fee notice you see on Amazon’s supply chain pages apply to Multichannel Fulfillment fees, not to AGL ocean or air freight. The surcharge sentence in the rate card itself is scoped to MCF pick, pack and ship. Do not add 3.5% to a freight quote on that basis.

You do have one free external sanity check. The Freightos Baltic Index publishes a container spot benchmark measuring “rolling short term Freight All Kind (FAK) spot tariffs and related surcharges between carriers, freight forwarders and high-volume shippers” (checked 2026-08-16). It cannot tell you whether an AGL quote is fair — that number is door-to-door, the index is port-to-port — but a quote moving against the market is worth a question.

When a Freight Forwarder Is Cheaper: Five Variables

There is no universal answer, and anyone giving you one is selling something. These are the inputs that actually swing it.

1. Where the goods have to land. AGL routes to Amazon facilities. If you need a buffer stop — kitting, bundling, poly-bagging, re-labelling, or holding stock against restock limits — you need a forwarder that delivers to your prep partner. This is not a price variable at all; it is a feasibility gate, and it decides the question before price enters.

2. Whether the bundled placement fee is worth anything to you. With Amazon Managed Placement, AGL is described as “a flat, all-inclusive, per-shipment rate solution that includes other destination charges required for placement. That means you won’t be charged for the FBA inbound placement service separately.” That bundle is the single strongest financial argument for AGL — and Amazon’s own FAQ names the case where it backfires: “If your inventory is low unit density per container, single inbound placement could have a lower FBA inbound cost per shipment.” Low units per container means fewer units to spread the bundle across.

3. Volume, and the leverage that comes with it. A forwarder shipping fifty containers a year for you will sharpen its number in a way programme pricing does not; below a few containers a year you have no leverage anywhere and convenience dominates.

4. Cash-flow shape. AGL in USD draws against your Seller Central disbursement account. A forwarder typically takes a deposit and invoices the balance on its own terms. For a thinly capitalised seller that difference can matter more than the headline rate.

5. Carton and container geometry. Under Amazon Managed Placement, “no more than 2,000 cartons can be shipped per 40-foot container, and no more than 1,000 cartons can be shipped per 20-foot container.” If your cartons are small and numerous, check that limit against your packing list before you assume AGL is available for the load. Carton dimensions set at the factory also follow the ASIN forever — see FBA size tiers.

A Worked Example (Illustrative Arithmetic, Not a Quote)

The comparison people make is wrong because it compares the two freight numbers. The correct comparison adds back what AGL bundles.

Inputs — all assumed, for arithmetic only. None of these are Amazon quotes.

• One 40ft container, 3,000 units, standard size, China to a US fulfilment centre.
• AGL Managed Placement all-in quote: A (you read this in the booking flow).
• Independent forwarder, door-to-FC, all destination charges itemised: F.
• FBA inbound placement service fee you would pay separately: P per unit.

AGL wins when A < F + (3,000 × P).

Put a placeholder number on P — say $0.30 per unit, an assumed figure we did not verify and which varies by split option, size tier and destination — and the bundle is worth $900 on this container. A forwarder quote has to beat the AGL quote by more than $900 before it is genuinely cheaper, and that is before you cost your own time booking the delivery appointment.

Get your real P from the fee preview in your own Seller Central account rather than from any published article, this one included. Then run the same sum twice: once at your normal split setting, once at minimal splits.

Common Mistakes

• Reading “all-inclusive” as “all-inclusive of everything that can go wrong.” The inclusion list is specific and published; demurrage, detention, exam holds and storage are not on it. Ask before you book, not after the container is held.
• Assuming Amazon becomes the importer. It does not. Your entity, your bond, your customs exposure — see the IOR section above.
• Adding the 3.5% surcharge to a freight quote. That surcharge is scoped to Multichannel Fulfillment fees.
• Not reconciling shipped units against received units. Freight is only the first place money goes missing; inbound receiving discrepancies are a separate reconciliation with a separate claims window. ReimburseOps, for instance, audits an uploaded Seller Central CSV against a fixed rule set for a flat subscription rather than a percentage of anything recovered; its free tier shows only part of the flagged records and does not export.
• Booking peak season at normal-season lead times. Ocean capacity out of Asia tightens well before Q4 deadlines, whichever party carries your box.
• Never quoting the alternative. Even if you intend to stay with AGL, price one independent forwarder a year on the same brief.

Once cargo is moving, track it yourself rather than assuming visibility: how to track FBA shipments.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does Amazon Global Logistics cost?

Amazon does not publish AGL rates. As of 2026-08-16 there is no rate card, no per-CBM table and no per-kilo table on any public Amazon page — the rate card Amazon does publish covers Multichannel Fulfillment fees only. You see a price when you request a quote inside Seller Central against a specific shipment. Any article quoting an AGL per-CBM figure is quoting a number Amazon has not published.

Is Amazon Global Logistics cheaper than a freight forwarder?

Sometimes, and you cannot know without quoting both on the same brief. The structural argument for AGL is that Managed Placement bundles the FBA inbound placement service into one per-shipment rate; the argument against is that you cannot negotiate it, cannot route it outside Amazon’s network, and cannot see a line-item invoice afterwards.

Does Amazon act as importer of record for AGL shipments?

No. Amazon’s onboarding guide requires you to hold an importer of record and a continuous bond before you can submit a shipment. Amazon will help you obtain a Customs Assigned Importer Number and will sell you a bond, but the liability stays with your entity.

Where do AGL charges appear in my account?

As service fees in the Payments dashboard, under the Transaction View tab, labelled FBA International Freight Shipping Charge and FBA International Freight Duties and Taxes Charge. They are deducted from your seller balance rather than invoiced separately, which is why per-unit landed cost is hard to reconstruct after the fact.

Can Amazon Global Logistics ship from India or Mexico?

No. As of 2026-08-16 the published origins are mainland China, Hong Kong and Vietnam, and the published destinations are the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan.

Can AGL deliver to my own prep warehouse instead of an FBA centre?

The destinations Amazon names are its fulfilment centres and its AWD facilities. If your workflow needs a stop at your own prep partner or 3PL first, that is the case for a forwarder — and for the domestic leg, see the Amazon shipping cost calculator guide.

Conclusion

Amazon Global Logistics is a real option with a narrow footprint: three origin countries, seven destination countries, and endpoints inside Amazon’s own network. Its genuine advantage is the bundled inbound placement and the disappearance of the delivery-appointment problem. Its genuine costs are an unpublished rate you cannot benchmark, a billing trail sellers repeatedly describe as opaque, and zero routing flexibility. Decide it as arithmetic, not loyalty: get the AGL quote in the booking flow, get one independent forwarder quote on the identical brief, add the placement fee back onto the forwarder’s side, and compare the totals. Sources here were checked 2026-08-16; lanes, promotions and surcharges change, so re-check before each booking season.