BFCM Deals enrollment closes today, 20 October. But before you push your whole c
By Twillms · October 21, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
BFCM Deals enrollment closes today, 20 October. But before you push your whole catalog through Deals, it’s worth stopping to think about which route actually fits.
Most brands default to Deals for everything, and that’s usually where the money leaks. The structure you pick changes both your upfront fees and your cap, and on a broad catalog that difference runs into the thousands.
Here’s roughly how we think about it:
𝗗𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘀, best for your hero ASINs
The reason to pay for Deals is reach. They show to all customers and get the visibility of the deals dashboard, which is what you’re really buying. The cost is $100 upfront per parent ASIN, whether that ASIN sells anything or not, so ten parents is a thousand dollars before you’ve made a sale. And the 1.5 percent variable fee is capped per deal, meaning every ASIN can run all the way up to its own $5,000 ceiling, so across a lot of volume and many deals the variable fees stack up fast.
𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝘀, better for broad coverage
Here you can bundle a lot of parent ASINs into a single promotion and still only pay $100 upfront, which is far more efficient. On top of that, the $5,000 cap covers the whole promotion rather than each ASIN, so your total variable fee exposure is capped in one place no matter how many ASINs you load in. The tradeoff is that these run to Prime customers only for the BFCM event.
So we generally add the hero ASINs/Parents into a best deal for all customers (if offered by Amazon) and everything else goes into a Price Discount.
None of that is the hard part, though. The thing that decides what you keep is the price you walk in with. Amazon sets a Max Price for each ASIN off your reference price and the lowest prices across sellers over the last 30 and 60 days, so if you’ve been discounting heavily in the weeks leading up, you’ve quietly dragged that ceiling down and now you’re stuck either running a shallow discount or cutting deeper than the margin can take.
We spend a lot of time with our brands on this well before anyone touches the ad account: getting the price path and the promotion structure right, keeping the reference price clean going in, and only then lining up the advertising on top. Promotions, rank, inventory and ads all move together, and treating them as one picture is usually the difference between an event that’s profitable and one that’s just busy.
What's your pricing & deal strategy for the busy season ahead?