As an Amazon seller, you’re undoubtedly familiar with coupons. But this new feature isn’t your ordinary promotional code. Under the Advertising tab in Seller Central, you will now see a Coupons page. You can now create digital coupons in Amazon Seller Central and offer discounts on a single product or set of products.
Digital Coupons Quick Facts
- Location: Coupons show up on detail pages, search results, the gold box deals page and even a separate landing page just for coupons. Eligible customers will see an orange badge displaying the discount next to the selling price.
- Claims: Customers can claim the discount through the coupon clipping function. All they have to do is clip the coupon, and savings are applied to eligible products when they check out.
- Discount: Coupons can be Percentage Off or Money Off. Either way, the discount must be between 5% and 80% off your lowest price in the last 30 days.
- Targeting: You have the option to target specific customers by selecting one of five customer segments: Amazon Prime members, Amazon Student members, Amazon Mom members, customers who have viewed certain ASINs, and customers who have purchased certain ASINs. Or, you can target All customers.
- Fees/Eligibility: Each coupon redemption is $0.60. You do not have to be brand registered to access Coupons.
- Budget: Set your maximum budget for each coupon. The coupon will be deactivated when it reaches 100% utilization. The budget you set will be a combination of the USD equivalent to the discount you are offering and the redemption fees.
What Are Coupons in Amazon Seller Central?
Here’s how Amazon explains Coupons in Amazon Seller Central:
“Simply put, digital coupons are coupons similar to those you find in brick and mortar stores. You can use them to discount a flat dollar or percent off an eligible single product or eligible families of products. Coupons can be a powerful, simple, and easy to use tool for promoting your products.
Coupons will show up throughout Amazon.com, including detail pages, search results, the gold box deals page and even a separate landing page just for coupons. The savings are instantly applied so coupons can help drive customer acquisition and sales by giving customers a reason to buy now. And they’re really simple for customers to use. All they have to do is clip the coupon, and savings are applied to eligible products when they check out, eliminating the need for loyalty cards, promotional codes, and opt-ins.
Getting started is easy. Just choose your products, enter how much of a discount you want, and set your budget. Give your coupon a title, and schedule how long you’d like the coupon to run. If you want, you can even choose to limit the audience of your coupon to a specified customer segment, such as Prime customers, as made available through the Seller Central tool. Find coupons under the advertising tab in Seller Central.”
Note: you can only see Coupons when actually logged into your account using your login. You cannot see the page option under the Advertising tab if you’re accessing the seller account via shared Seller Central settings.
How to Set Up a Listing Coupon
Coupon setup is fairly straightforward. Let’s walk through how to submit your coupon(s) inside of Seller Central.
- Add your products to your coupon. You can feature up to 50 products in one coupon. While adding multiple products, selecting within the same sub-category/product group will help provide a better customer experience.
- Set discount amount and budget. You can offer percentage or money off discounts. Amazon requires the discount to be between 5% and 80% of your lowest price for the product in the last 30 day. The budget you set will be utilized as customers redeem your coupon, and Amazon will deactivate your coupon when your budget is fully utilized. The budget is shared among these two costs: USD equivalent of the discount you are offering and redemption fees ($0.60 for every redemption).
- Schedule and target your coupon. You can set a duration for your coupon between 1-90 days. The earliest start date will be three days from today. You have the option to choose to limit the audience of your coupon to one of six customer segments: All customers, Amazon Prime members, Amazon Student members, Amazon Mom members, Customers who have viewed certain ASINs, and customers who have purchased certain ASINs.
- Monitor performance. You can monitor and track the performance of your coupon in real time within the Seller Central Coupon page under “Running” coupons.
Are the New Coupons Good for Amazon Sellers?
Our short answer: yes and no.
Yes, because the early adopters who schedule their coupons now will likely see an increase in clicks and conversions initially. Because Amazon is making it easy to find and apply the coupon, these sellers will likely benefit.
Yes, because for sellers willing to take a profit cut and pay the extra $0.60 per sale, they may have a competitive edge over their competitors who cannot afford to run coupons often.
Yes, because you can use the targeting feature to give a bigger discount to those who have viewed or bought other items in your brand or in your competitors’ brands. This provides a pretty cool opportunity to capture traffic that you otherwise may not have!
No, because in the long term, with this feature being widely available to the masses, there is not much exclusivity. The Best Seller badge is special because not everyone has one. But imagine if almost all products had a Best Seller badge … then customers would ignore it completely. Sure, the actual discount can differ between products with these new coupons, but the same principle can apply here. We will be interested to see how many sellers end up using the new coupons and to what magnitude.
No, because coupons have the potential to create price wars and crush margins. If your product’s sale price is currently $20 and you set your widely-available coupon to $2, you’re making $2 less per product (not to mention the extra $0.60 you’re paying Amazon for the sale). At scale, that will add up. And now, between sellers, there is an added competitive component. While you’re offering $2 off your $20 product, your competitor may be offering $3 off their $20 product. Of course, you could choose to just up your selling price to compensate for the discount. At this point, we’re not sure yet whether or not the coupon shows up on a Sponsored Ad. If it does not, charging a higher price to offset the coupon discount will have a negative impact on your sponsored ads performance.
Conclusion
We believe, in the long term, larger sellers will probably benefit most from coupons and smaller sellers may be left behind a bit here. Larger sellers may have the room in their margins to offer these discounts, whereas smaller sellers may need to be more conscious of the profit they are making on each individual item.
Overall, coupons may be worth testing out, and we absolutely think that you should jump ahead of the curve and take advantage of them! You never know, it could turn out to be an awesome opportunity to set yourself apart from others in your market. In our opinion, much like sponsored ads, it will come down to whether or not you are willing to take the profit cut on these purchases. We are excited to see how sellers get inventive with these.
How will you use these coupons? Let us know in the comments below!
