What is the Amazon Brand Referral Bonus Program?

Amazon credits sellers 10% of sales that were sourced from outside Amazon. The goal is to encourage brand owners to market their Amazon product on platforms like Facebook and Google.

Updated on 3 min read
What is the Amazon Brand Referral Bonus Program?

The Brand Referral Bonus program allows Amazon brands to earn a bonus from off-Amazon marketing platforms. The program rewards brands by returning an average of 10% per sale from traffic they have driven to Amazon.

Hoorah! Brilliant news for the savvy sellers already marketing their Amazon products on platforms like Facebook and Google. The bonus will considerably reduce the cost of this marketing initiative.

Given Amazon ads are becoming ever more expensive YoY, and product search results are increasingly populated, now is a better time than ever for sellers to expand their marketing efforts to the powerful tools outside of Amazon.

How does the Amazon Brand Referral Bonus Program work

When a customer visits Amazon, searches for, and buys a product, the referral fee will remain 15% for the brand. However, when the brand directs a customer to their Amazon product from a Facebook group, Bing ad, landing page or otherwise, the brand will only pay around 5%.

The program serves to accelerate growth for brand owners, who will receive the bonus for purchases of their products for up to 14 days from the first referral.

Amazon's Motivation

Amazon want to continue to grow their ecommerce market share and remain the go-to marketplace online. When a shopper buys through Amazon - and enjoys the shopping experience - they're more likely to come back to Amazon for future shopping.

The introduction of this bonus program will incentivise brands to 1) direct traffic to Amazon rather than their own storefront and 2) explore new marketing channels that were previously inaccessible due to the elevated CAC (customer acquisition cost).

How to Enroll

Sellers need to be brand registered. If you sell on Amazon but have not yet registered your brand, visit the Amazon Brand Services page to get started.

Once brand registered, sellers can register for the Brand Referral Bonus program and enroll in Amazon Attribution if they are not already.

As of the 1st of October 2021 — the bonus program is only available to brand owners selling in Amazon’s US store. For the terms of the program, please check Amazon’s official documentation.

Creating your Attribution Tag

Once enrolled, you must create a 'tag' to begin qualifying your off-Amazon traffic. Create your tag through the Amazon Attribution dashboard. Amazon will provide a link that can be used to attribute all off-Amazon traffic and earn rewards through the bonus program.

To get started, log into the dashboard —

  1. Create a new order
    1. Add the products from your brand that you wish to track.
    2. Name your order for example [campaign][date]. This is how you track the attribution for your products.
  2. Create a new line item
    1. Specify the publisher as the source of the ad traffic. Best practice is to create one line item per publisher channel.
    2. Enter your Click-through URL, this will be your product detail page or brand store page.

Click save to get your attribution link. Sales made through this link will earn you rewards.

Sellers can also use attribution to track key metrics and optimize their marketing efforts. Track click-through (The number of times the ad was clicked, excluding general invalid traffic like bots), detail page views, purchases, and sales revenue. Use these data points to evaluate your ad campaign performance and adjust your ad spend accordingly.

Please note there is a delay of 2 months before Amazon credits your bonus to account for cancellations and returns.

Traffic to Amazon vs Your Own Website

Brand owner — "Why should I link paid traffic to Amazon instead of my own website and skip the referral fee entirely?"

A good question.

  • To grow revenue in the long-term. Driving sales on Amazon will boost the rank of your Amazon product. Allowing you to get a competitive edge in your product category and increase relevance for your key search terms on the Amazon marketplace.
    • This will have a knock-on effect on your unit session percentage. The hot traffic will convert at a higher rate than the average shopper, inflating your units per session and ultimately, your rank.
  • To maximise conversions. The Amazon marketplace is trusted and offers good consumer protection. Shoppers are far more likely to buy if your product has positive social proof on an established marketplace.
  • To benefit from FBA. You may not have fulfillment capabilities, or a way to process orders. Fulfillment by Amazon is a very good way to delegate the concerns of storage, packing, delivery and returns.
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