If you’ve read our Guide to Amazon Seller Promotions, you’re probably well on your way to learning how to leverage all the promotion types available in your Amazon Seller account. And this one, is a personal fav. Who doesn’t love a good BOGO? Buy One, Get One ice cream. Buy One, Get One shoes. Life is just better with a BOGO!

If you’re advertising on Amazon through Seller Central, you might have considered running a BOGO promotion for your products, whether it be to clear out excess inventory or drum up new sales and reviews from deal hunters. By creating a BOGO offer, you allow your customers one or more free items after each other item they purchase. As you can imagine, like with our Percentage-Off blog post, putting caps in place will be important.

Step 1 – Login & Go to Promotions:

To create a Percentage-Off Promotion, log into 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 BOGO promotion on one product (or a focused set of products if you want to get fancy).

Step 3 – Set up Your Promotion:

Once you have submitted your product selection, navigate back to the “Create a Promotion” tab, and select Buy One Get One > 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 BOGO 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:

• At least X quantity of items (for example, if they buy at least 2 pairs of shoes, they get one free)
• At least X amount in dollars (for example, if they spend at least $50 worth of shoes, they get a pair free)
• For every quantity of items purchased (for example, for every pair of shoes purchased, they get a free pair)

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 pick the product selection that we created in Step 2.

Underneath this is the “Buyer Gets” field, which is limited to only include “Free Items.” For the next field, called “Applies to,” select “Purchased Items,” which will refer to the product selection you set up earlier.

The next field, “Buyer benefit applies to a quantity of X when buyer purchases X” is important. It’s not one of those fancy math equations meant to stump you, just something you should think about. This section simply details how many free products your customer will get for each purchase. If you want to make this a true BOGO, you would input “1” and “1”. If this is a BTGO (Buy TWO get one), you would input “2” and “1”, capiche?

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 are very straightforward. You simply select a start and end date for your BOGO 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 mistakenly give away more product than intended because they didn’t consider this step carefully enough. 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 BOGO Promotion is deciding whether you want the offer 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. During this phase, review each part of your promotion setup to ensure that it is correct. Seriously, turn it over in your head a bit, and make sure there are no holes for those deal hunters to pick away at. Think through the limits you’ve put in place, the duration you are running the promotion, and claim code eligibility.

All finished? Congratulations, it’s time for submission! 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’d love to work with you!