Every seller carries a number around in their head. It usually came from a Facebook group comment, a broker's cold email, or the price a friend got in 2021, and it is usually wrong. Before you spend a year getting ready to sell, or talk yourself out of selling at all, it is worth twenty minutes with the formula buyers actually use.
This post is the valuation piece of our full guide to
selling your Amazon business. The entire market runs on one line of math:
value = SDE times a multiple. Everything else is negotiation.
Start with SDE, not the profit on your books
SDE is seller's discretionary earnings: your net profit over the trailing twelve months, plus everything the business paid for that a new owner would not have to pay. Add back your own salary. Add back true one-time costs, like a trademark filing or a product mold. Add back the personal spending that runs through the business, the phone plan, the home office share, the software you really use for other projects.
A quick example. Say you did $400,000 in sales last year and the books show $52,000 in net profit. You paid yourself $30,000, spent $6,000 on one-time trademark and photography work, and ran $4,000 of personal costs through the company. Your SDE is $92,000. That is the number the multiple gets applied to, and it is nearly double what the tax return suggests the business earns.
One warning: do not get creative. Every add-back gets tested in due diligence, and a buyer who catches one fake add-back re-checks the whole file with a flashlight. Claim what is real and defensible, document it, and stop there.
The 2026 multiple, which is the reality check part
Most Amazon FBA businesses in 2026 change hands somewhere between
1.6x and 3.3x SDE. The frothy aggregator offers of 2021 sat well above that range, and they are gone. Today's buyers are individuals with SBA loans, small funds, and the surviving aggregators, and all of them are pickier than the market you remember reading about.
Where you land inside that range matters more than anything you will do during the sale itself. On $92,000 of SDE, the gap between a 1.8x business and a 2.6x business is about $74,000. Same products, same revenue, very different exits.
What pushes the multiple up
- A real brand: registered trademark, Brand Registry, products people search for by name
- Earnings spread across many ASINs instead of one hero product
- Three or more years of history with a flat or growing trend
- An owner working a few hours a week, with SOPs a stranger could follow
- More than one supplier, or at least a second one qualified and ready
- Some revenue off Amazon, even a modest Shopify or wholesale channel
What drags it down
- One ASIN making most of the money, or one supplier with no backup
- Arbitrage and reseller models, which buyers treat as a job, not an asset
- A declining twelve-month trend, which buyers read as a melting ice cube
- Messy books that mix personal and business spending
- Margins that shrink every time Amazon raises fees. Know your full 2026 fee stack cold, because the buyer's analyst certainly will
The extra step for Canadian sellers
If you own the business from Canada, the valuation math is identical and the price will usually be quoted in US dollars, since most buyers are American. The number that should drive your decision, though, is what lands in your pocket after tax, and that swings dramatically depending on whether you sell assets or shares and how your company is structured. That is a tax planning question, not a valuation question, so we will not butcher it here. Our accounting firm, Jones & Cosman, wrote a full
exit planning guide for Canadian online sellers, and it is worth reading before you talk to a single broker.
Frequently asked questions
How do I calculate SDE for my Amazon business?
Take net profit from the last twelve months, add back owner salary, one-time expenses, and personal costs run through the business. Use accrual numbers if you can, keep a written note for every add-back, and update it monthly once you are within two years of selling.
What SDE multiple do Amazon FBA businesses get in 2026?
A practical range is 1.6x to 3.3x SDE. Small reseller businesses sit at the bottom, established trademarked brands with diversified earnings sit at the top, and the strongest brands occasionally beat it.
Do buyers pay for revenue or profit?
Profit. Revenue makes the listing look big, but every offer is built on SDE. A $1 million revenue business earning $80,000 is worth less than a $500,000 business earning $150,000.
Is my business too small to sell?
Probably not. Marketplaces list Amazon businesses under $50,000 of SDE all the time. Multiples are lower down there and buyers are fewer, but there is a market, especially for clean, simple businesses with honest books.
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