How to create a promotion on Amazon

Instead of asking "When am I getting a promotion?" or "How much of a raise am I going to get?", I'm thinking, "How can I take this chunk of money and invest it to make a greater return?" Or even more importantly, "Who in my life can I help?"

I know what it’s like to not be able to afford a cheeseburger. I know what it’s like to be hungry. So planning out where I put my money and making sure I use it well and invest it back into the community is so important.

I love teaching because it’s giving other people the opportunity to think differently like I do. I will be open and honest with you about my victories and failures so you can get a realistic idea of what it’s like.

Today I want to teach you how to boost your product sales through a strategic price drop, running sales, and running promotions.

Strategic Price Drop

This means you keep dropping your price if someone is selling for cheaper under your same listing. If your product is not private label-able, or it has a patent and you are approved to sell it but other people are too, then other people can easily list for a lower price under your listing. You need to keep dropping your price to be lower than theirs. But if you keep dropping yours and they keep dropping theirs, eventually someone’s not going to make a profit anymore, and that’s scary.

If you weather the storm and keep doing it until they give up, it’s amazing what will happen. It’s like playing poker. You make them think you can do this forever. Of course you can’t, but you make them think that while they’re losing money, and at some point they’re going to stop. They surrender, they leave, they raise their price. Then you can bring your price back up again. That is one way to win when someone else is selling your product.

Running a Sale

I’m going to show you how to put a sale price on your items, it’s super easy. Go into Seller Central and click on Manage Inventory, then find the product you want to put a sale on. You want to sell more of it, so create a little sense of urgency. Click “Edit.”

Once you’re editing, go to “Offer.” Scroll down to the price.

If someone is selling for a lower price than you, you can click “Match Low Price” to match the competitor’s price. Keep in mind that if they offer free shipping, but you require shipping costs, your matched low price will adjust to include that shipping so that it’s still competitive.

To run a sale, all you have to do is type in a price in the “Sale Price” column for how low you’re willing to sell it for. Pick the Sale Start Date and End Date, the days you want the sale to start and end on, then hit “Save and finish.” It might take up to 15 minutes to show up, but it’s that easy.

On the product page, it will show this discount. It’s going to highly increase the chance this item will sell, and sometimes, that’s all you need to get boosted. If people start buying it and are more interested because it’s on sale, it’ll start selling better on its own.

It’s all about strategy. You don’t want a product to just sit there. You want to try different things, find out what works, but always make sure you know your numbers and are not losing profit.

Running A Promotion

How do you run a promotion? It’s very simple. First, go to Advertising, then Promotions in Seller Central.

Let’s say you want to create a Buy One Get One promotion. Click “Create” under that option.

“Buyer purchases” is at least two. This means they’ll “buy” two, but one item will get the promotion applied to it, so they’re actually buying one and getting the other free.

“Purchased items” lets you select what item or group of items the promotion is applied to. If you haven’t already created a product selection with those items in it, go ahead and click that.

It’s pretty simple: I usually select “ASIN List” as the type of product selection, and then all you have to do is copy and paste the ASINs of the products you want in this group and give it a name. You can add up to 4,000 ASINs or only do one if you want to. 

“Buyer gets” free items, so they get one free if they purchase one.

“Applies to” purchased items, so it’s going to be the same item that they add to cart, not another one from your store.

“Buyer benefit applies to a quantity of” one item when the buyer purchases at least 2. This just means that the promotion will apply to one item when the buyer adds two, so they’ll pay for one and get the other free.

Under Advanced options there’s only “Exclude items,” which I don’t want to do, so we can skip that.

Next, you can pick your start and end dates for the promotion. I usually do a month.

The “Internal Description” just means what you call your promotion so you can identify it; it won’t be shown anywhere publicly on Amazon.

Now, let’s say you want this promotion to use claim codes. These settings are very important if you are.

Single-use means a generated code can only be used once. Group codes are for if you want a code to be used for a group of people, so the code is used over and over again by multiple people.

For single-use codes, that code can only be used one time, period. “One redemption per customer”, however, means that a customer can only use a code connected to this promotion once. So if you generate 14 different codes, they can only ever use one of them if this option is checked.

For claim code combinability, I put unrestricted. This just means it can be combined with other codes or promotions if there are any.

After you’re done with these, hit “Review,” and if everything looks good, you hit “Submit.”

Now we have our finished promotion. Now I need to create the claim codes so that people can enter them in to use the promotion. If I wanted to, I could make it a public promotion so that people can see it on the product listing and apply it from there, but I want to go one step further and actually send out the individual codes.

Go into Manage Promotions and click on yours. If the date you set it to start hasn’t arrived yet, it’ll be under "Pending." Once you click on the promotion, click “Manage claim codes.”

You’re going to create a new Claim Code group. Enter in the name you want and how many codes you want to generate; I’ll do 10 for this example. Hit create. Then all you have to do is wait a couple minutes so that the claim codes can generate: I usually refresh the page once or twice, and then it’ll appear. You can download the text file and you’ll have the claim codes.

Now if someone takes this code and enters it into the promotion box when they buy the product and checkout on Amazon, they will buy two and get one for free.

I hope this was helpful to you. If you have any questions, let me know! I believe if someone creates content, it should be super helpful and practical, as well as specific and step-by-step so people know how to follow along, because I know the frustration of trying to figure something out and not understanding what to do. Have an awesome day.