We recently published our Guide to Amazon Seller Central Promotions. And now we’ll take a deeper dive into each of the different types of promotions we introduced in that post.

First up is one of the most popular promotion types in the Amazon Marketplace: “Percentage-Off Promotions” (or what used to be Money-Off Promotions). This promotion allows you to offer the purchaser a discount on your inventory items based on how they are buying your products.

You can create the promotion for single buys, bulk buys, or minimum dollar amount buys.

Step 1 – Login & Go to Promotions:

To create a Percentage-Off Promotion, log in to your Amazon Seller Central account, and at the top select Advertising > Promotions.

Step 2 – Create Your Product Selection:

After selecting Promotions, navigate over to the “Manage Product Selection” tab. From here, click “Create Product Selection.”

Once you select “Create Product Selection” you’ll be given the option to select which products you want to promote in a variety of ways. We most typically chose ASIN List.

Once you select how you’d like to create your product selection, you’ll be given options to add a Tracking ID, Internal Description and then create a list based on your option choice. Be careful when selecting which items to add to your list, as you’ll want to make sure they are typed in properly, and that you are only offering your promotion on a focused set of products.

Step 3 – Set up Your Promotion:

Once you have submitted your product selection, navigate back to the “Create a Promotion” tab, and select Percentage Off > Create.

Once you hit Create, a window displaying all your promotion options will appear. In the interface, Step 1 is selecting the conditions of your promotion.

In the first box, you’ll see “Buyer Purchases” and this is where you select the conditions of the deal. You have quite a few options:

• Atleast X quantity of items (for example, if they buy three T-shirts, they get X% off)
• Atleast X amount in dollars (for example, if they spend atleast $30, they get X% off)
• For every quantity of items purchased (for example, for every T-shirt purchased, they get X% off)

Once you select which buyer purchase option works for you, the next field to fill in is the “Purchased Items” section. This is where you would select the product selection grouping that we created in Step 2.

Underneath this is the “Buyer Gets” field. This is where you input the discounts. At this time, Amazon only allows for percentage discounts (not discounts in dollar amounts).

Once you’ve filled out the Conditions section of the promotion setup, you’ll see an area for Scheduling (Step 2 in the Amazon interface), and for Additional Options (Step 3 in the interface).

The Scheduling options is very straightforward. You simply select a start and end date for the promotion. Please note though, that you must allow 4 hours before any promotion can be started. If you attempt to start a promotion within 4 hours of the time you submit it, it will be denied. So, plan accordingly!

The Additional Options step is critical – so don’t pass over it. We’ve seen some advertisers accidentally give away more product than intended solely for not giving this step ample attention. A few things you will want to consider in this section:

• Do you want to have a claim code? Having one can help you better track this promotion and its profitability.
• If so, can users combine coupon codes?
• Is this a single-use code, or a group code which can be used over and over until the promotion is scheduled to end?

The last step on this page for creating a Percentage-Off Promotion is deciding whether you want the savings outlined on the product detail page and deciding what other custom text you want shown on the Checkout Page. To see these options, expand the menu for Customize Messaging.

If you want your promotion on your detail page, click the box titled, “Detail page display text.” Then, you can edit the following fields to customize the text shown to your customers:

• Checkout Display Text: Shown to the buyer in the checkout phase
• Purchased Items Display Text: The name of items in the promotion, used in the detail page display text
• Detail Page Display Text: The text that is shown under the “Promotions and Special Offers” section of the product detail page

Step 4 – Review & Submit!

Once you’ve set up your promotion it’s time to select the Review button. Check over each part of your promotion setup to ensure that it is PERFECT. Seriously, consider the ins and outs – the limits you’ve put in place, the duration you are running the promotion – E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G.

You’ll want to be absolutely certain there are no errors. Or else, you’ll be creating blog posts like this, “Amazon Promotions – How I Cost my Company $45,000 with One Assumption”

All done reviewing? Time to submit! Yay, you did it!

If you need help setting up promotions on Amazon, or are hesitant to run something without a second watchful eye, give our team a call today. We’ll help you out!