Amazon is letting sellers who use Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) offer Prime Exclusive Discounts. In addition to being able to use the feature year-round, sellers can take advantage of the feature to attract shoppers during next month’s Prime Day shopping event.
On Prime Day, products offering the “Prime Exclusive Discount” will also display a Prime Day Deals badge. Sellers can create the discounts for Prime Day through July 5, 2019.
Details about Prime Exclusive Discounts:
- The product offer displays a discounted price with the regular price crossed out, plus a savings summary in search results and the product detail page. Example: “You Save: $13.50 (15%) as a Prime Member.”
- On Prime Day, products also display a Prime Day Deals badge. You can create the discounts for Prime Day through July 5, 2019.
- To use Prime Exclusive Discounts, you must be a Fulfillment by Amazon seller. Join FBA by visiting Get Started with Fulfillment by Amazon.
To create a discount, click the Advertising tab in Seller Central and select Prime Exclusive Discounts.
For more information, including eligibility requirements, go to Prime Exclusive Discount.
A seller commenting about the new feature advised colleagues to heed Amazon’s suggestion that they proceed carefully and initially test 10-15 SKUs.
Some sellers wondered why Amazon didn’t make the feature available to SFP items (Seller Fulfilled Prime), and one seller was more cynical, believing the feature benefited Amazon far more than sellers:
“In reality this is just a way to make sellers pay for promoting Amazon’s Prime membership. No benefits for sellers. We do the discounts, Amazon gets more Prime subscribers, and we, sellers, get even less profit with already tight profit margins.”
Some agreed that they’d be more interested in the feature if they were rewarded by lowers FBA fees.
I set one up for 25 SKU’s. Here are my observations about the process.
* Minimum discount allowed is 20%. Bad example shown above! Better have some good margin to cover this much discount. If you choose an “Amount Off” promotion, make sure it still works out to a 20% or larger discount.
* At this point, you cannot “use the feature year-round”. It’s only for Prime Day. There is a grayed-out check box for Prime Day that can’t be unchecked.
* I used the Restock Inventory report (from Seller Central Reports->Fulfillment menu) to sort my current products and copy the SKUs into the Prime Price Loader template.
* The Prime Price Loader template is case-sensitive. “Amount Off” works, “Amount off” doesn’t.
* If you submit a template, and you don’t like the results — DON’T submit a second one! There is no way to select a whole batch of SKUs to edit or remove. Best to get it right the first time, and if you goof then fix the bad entries manually.
* I’m doing this to gain exposure to the brand, not to make a big profit on a lot of sales. At 20% off, there’s no big profit left! I just want to do this for Prime Day since they’ll be ramping up the hype for it. I can’t see doing this every day for Prime members even if I could — what would the point be?