Prime Big Deal Days and Black Friday 2026: Amazon Deals, Fees and Price Rules

A deal is the most expensive thing a seller can do in a quarter and the easiest to submit. The form takes ten minutes. The fee, the discount, the advertising to make the discount visible and the stock to survive it are the cost, and they are paid in November against a decision made in September.

This is the deals half of the Q4 plan: what Amazon charges in 2026, what it requires of the price, the rule that decides whether an October deal poisons a November one, and the question that should be asked before any of it, which is whether the product belongs in a deal at all. The stock behind the deal is a separate discipline, covered in Amazon inventory management.

A Prime Big Deal Days deal in 2026 costs the same as a Prime Day one: $100 upfront per promotion plus 1.5 percent of promotional sales, capped at $5,000, with $50 off the upfront fee for submissions before 5 August. The holiday peak fulfilment fee, which Amazon averages at $0.32 per unit, applies separately to every FBA unit from 15 October, with the 3.5 percent fuel and logistics surcharge Amazon has added to fulfilment fees since April on top. Prime Big Deal Days submissions closed on 22 September; the Black Friday and Cyber Monday window closed on 20 October, as Amazon announced.

The two events work together because of one exclusion in the lookback rule. A deal price is judged against the product's recent prices, but Prime Big Deal Days promotional prices are excluded from the 30 and 60 day lookback windows, so the October deal does not become the reference a Black Friday deal has to beat, and both are judged against the everyday price. A plain discount run beside a deal should be treated as inside the lookback until Amazon says otherwise.

Not every product belongs in a deal. The ones that do have stock deep enough to sell through, a margin that survives the fee and the discount, and reviews strong enough to convert the extra traffic, with advertising set up beside the deal before it starts.

For most brands that means a short list: the few products where a deal sells through stock that would otherwise sit, at a margin that still pays after the fee, the discount and the surcharge.

Prime Big Deal Days falls in early October, on the same timing as 2025. Its deal submission window opened on 8 July and closed on 22 September, after Amazon extended it from 8 September. Black Friday week and Cyber Monday took submissions from 8 July to 20 October, with an early submission discount deadline of 5 September. A thread pinned in the Seller Forums since gives 13 November for Best Deals and Lightning Deals, which Amazon's own announcements do not say, so the Deals dashboard is the place to check whether a product can still be submitted. Both windows were announced together in July, which is Amazon's way of saying the deal decision is a summer decision.

Missing a window does not remove a product from the event; it removes the deal badge and the deal placement. A plain price discount still runs and still counts as a promotion in the customer's eyes, without the fee and without the visibility the badge buys.

Amazon's announcement is titled same fees, same eligibility, earlier deadlines, and the fees are Prime Day 2026's: an upfront promotion fee of $100 per promotion and a variable fee of 1.5% of promotional sales, capped at $5,000. Submitting before the early deadline saved $50 on the upfront fee. There are no new eligibility requirements.

On top of the deal fee sits the holiday peak fulfilment fee, an average of $0.32 per unit from 15 October to 14 January, and the 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge Amazon has added to fulfilment fees since April applies to the peak fee as well. A deal at 20% off on a product whose fulfilment fee has just risen is a different margin from the one the summer spreadsheet showed. Amazon seller fees explained sets out the stack the deal sits on.

Illustrative figures for one product, using the 2026 deal fees above, to show how quickly a deal's margin narrows.

The everyday position. The product sells for $40. After a 15 percent referral fee of $6, an FBA fulfilment fee of $6, and a landed cost of $12, it keeps $16 a unit, 40 percent of the price.

At the deal price. A 20 percent deal takes the price to $32. The referral fee falls to $4.80. The fulfilment fee rises by the holiday peak fee, which Amazon averages at $0.32 a unit, about $0.33 once the 3.5 percent fuel and logistics surcharge is applied to it. The landed cost stays at $12. The unit now keeps about $9, less than three fifths of its everyday margin.

The deal fees. The $100 upfront fee has to be earned back before the deal makes anything, and the 1.5 percent variable fee takes about $0.48 from every unit sold at $32. At roughly $8.40 a unit after the variable fee, the upfront fee is covered by the first dozen units.

The advertising. If the campaign beside the deal costs $3 a unit sold, the unit keeps about $5.40. That is still positive, which makes the deal worth running only if it sells nearly three times the units the product would sell at its everyday price on the same days.

The test. Put the expected deal volume, the deal margin and the everyday alternative side by side. A deal that sells twice the usual volume at a third of the usual margin earns less than the everyday price would have. A deal that lifts rank and keeps it into December may still be worth it, but that is the decision to name, not to assume.

Amazon judges a deal price against the product's recent price history, the lookback, so that a deal is a real reduction and not a price that was raised in order to be cut. The rule that matters this year is the exclusion: Prime Big Deal Days promotional prices are excluded from the 30 day and 60 day lookback windows. The October deal price does not become the reference the November deal has to beat.

That exclusion is what makes two events in eight weeks workable. Without it, a 20% deal in October would set a reference that a Black Friday deal had to undercut, and the second event would be priced off the first. With it, both deals are judged against the everyday price. The everyday price, and the discipline of holding it between events, is the subject of the repricing strategy article.

One question from the forum thread is worth carrying: whether the exclusion applies to all sales in the event window or only to the paid deal. Amazon's wording names Prime Big Deal Day promotional prices. A seller running a plain discount alongside a deal should treat the discount price as inside the lookback until Amazon says otherwise.

A product that missed the submission windows still sells during the events. It sells without the deal badge and the deal placement, and the choices left are about price and visibility rather than about a deal.

Check the Deals dashboard first. As above, a forum thread gives a later date for some deal types than Amazon's announcements do. The dashboard shows what the product can still be submitted for, which is the only answer that counts.

A plain price discount. It still shows as a lower price and still converts the extra traffic of the event weeks. It carries no deal fee, and it should be treated as inside the lookback, so it can become the reference a later deal is judged against.

A coupon. Coupons show on the listing and in search, and they can be set up at short notice. They carry their own fees, and the coupon's discount comes on top of any price cut, so the margin needs the same arithmetic as a deal.

The everyday price, with advertising. For a product whose margin does not survive a discount, the best choice is often the everyday price, held steady, with advertising raised for the event days. Traffic rises across the whole site, and a listing at its normal price on a busy day sells more than on a quiet one.

Plan next year now. The windows open in July and close weeks before the events. Put next year's deal decisions, and the dates, in the calendar while this year's results are fresh.

Three tests, in order. The first is margin after the deal, the variable fee, the surcharge and the advertising: if the unit loses money at the deal price, the deal is a launch tactic or nothing, and a launch in October is a decision about January. The second is stock: a deal that sells out on day one is a deal that paid its fee for one day of sales and then handed the badge to a competitor; the calendar's inbound cutoffs decide what stock a deal can have. The third is rank: a product on page two that a deal can lift onto page one, and hold there with reviews and sales velocity, is the product the fee is for.

A product that passes all three is a deal. A product that passes only the first is a coupon. A product that passes none is priced right where it is, and the event is a week of higher traffic at the everyday price, which is worth more than most sellers expect.

A deal is judged on what it did to the product's whole quarter, not on the sales in its own window. A deal that sold well and left the product weaker in December was an expensive one.

The deal itself. Units sold at the deal price, the margin after the deal fees, the surcharge and the advertising, against the units and margin the product would have made at its everyday price on the same days. The everyday comparison is the one most often skipped.

The weeks after. Sales for the four weeks after the deal against the four weeks before it. If they settle higher, the deal lifted rank or reviews in a way that lasts. If they fall below where they started, the deal brought sales forward rather than adding to them.

The stock. Whether the product ran out during or after the deal, and for how long. A stockout after a deal undoes much of what the deal paid for.

The returns. Returns from event weeks arrive later and are often higher. Read them a month after the event, not the day after, before deciding the deal paid.

The reviews. New reviews from deal buyers, and whether the rating moved. Deal buyers include more first time customers, whose expectations differ from the brand's regulars.

Write the result down for each product. Next year's deal list is best built from which products this year's deals actually helped, rather than from which ones sold the most units during the event.

A deal without advertising relies on the deal page, and the deal page in November is the busiest page on the site. The campaign that runs beside a deal is a budget decision for the week, not the month: bids raised on the product's own terms before the event so the ad is already in position, budget released on the day so the campaign does not run out at noon, and bids brought back down the day after so the post event traffic is not bought at event prices.

The structure that makes that possible without rebuilding campaigns is in the Amazon PPC strategies article, and the routine for the week itself is the one in the weekly PPC optimisation routine, run daily for the fortnight. For the brands we run, this is the quarter's core work in Amazon advertising: the deal chosen in September, the campaign shaped for the week, the budget released and withdrawn on the day.