How Amazon Brand Referral Bonus Program Works For Your Business

You can take advantage of many promising marketing opportunities when running your store on this marketplace. Amazon FBA is one of the most popular ones. Still, recently, Amazon has announced another winning program for brand owners. Amazon’s referral program allows sellers to reduce their fees in exchange for attracting traffic at their own cost instead of using Amazon’s exclusive marketing tactics. 

How much is the Amazon referral bonus and how to use it? Let’s find out how this initiative can work for brands in 2023. 

What are the Essence and Mutual Benefits of an Amazon Referral Program

An Amazon Referral Program was launched in July 2021. The essence of the program is the opportunity for the brand owners to cut their referral fees. As you know, sellers have to pay a fee to Amazon each time they sell an item. It is the core business model that powers most online marketplaces. 

However, with the help of a referral bonus on Amazon, you can reduce the fee since the platform provides the sellers with an 8-15% bonus rate for every lead attracted by the brand on its own. 

Below are the conditions for joining Amazon’s brand referral bonus program and receiving a bonus:

• Your brand should be a part of an AMZ Brand Registry.
• Then you should apply to join the program.
• At the next step, you should get an Amazon attribution. 

A specific link will prove that the lead you have attracted comes from the referral traffic you have generated. For example, from Google PPC, Facebook ads, your blog, or social media marketing.

• After your lead makes a purchase, you get a 10% referral bonus for customer purchases that works as a discount for the referral fee you have to pay Amazon.

How Do Sellers Get Paid?

As mentioned, it won’t be a cash bonus. However, it’s a credit against your fees on the platform.

There’s a two-month delay before the credit will come up in your account to allow for customer returns and order cancellations. For instance, the bonus would be credited to your profile in October if an eligible sale was made in August. In October and beyond, this bonus will be used to deduct referral commissions until all the attributed bonus is credited.

To find your report for Referral Bonus, download a report within your Seller Central. You can go to Brands>>Brand Referral Bonus on your Seller Central page. The system delivers a report every Friday summarizing the bonus amount accumulated over the preceding 90 days.

What Makes Amazon Referral Program Beneficial

There is no catch in the referral bonus program recently launched by Amazon. It is one of the Amazon marketing campaigns that are actually beneficial for both sellers and the marketplace itself. 

Firstly, the platform understands that competition in their search results page can never give every seller equal opportunities. However, those with the best seller ranking, product rating, compelling product descriptions, and thousands of customer reviews will always be better discoverable by the customers. 

By launching an Amazon Referral Program, the marketplace allows less popular brands to drive their traffic to their store, accelerate growth and build a reputation. Of course, attracting this traffic can’t be free, and the marketplace compensates a share of your non-AMZ marketing efforts and spending by reducing your referral fee with a bonus. 

And most importantly – Amazon understands that most novice shoppers will return to the marketplace to make a repeated purchase, which is another win-win. So, to use this program, you should develop a smart and cost-effective strategy for attracting prospective leads from the web and reducing the cost per lead as much as possible.

It makes selling on the platform much more appealing to most omnichannel merchants. Other perks include:

• Increased return on ad spends:  When it comes to small brands, clients often trust sales on AMZ more than non-affiliated eCommerce platforms. There is a greater chance of converting a sale on an advertisement that directs a buyer to an AMZ listing than an eCommerce website.
• Higher organic rankings on AMZ: Since the release of its latest algorithm, the marketplace has been rewarding merchants who direct off-Amazon traffic to the product listings with higher search rankings and helping merchants monitor their off-Amazon sales through AMZ Attribution.
• Greater ad effectiveness: The Brand Referral Bonus program continues to reimburse merchants on their referral fees for off-AMZ traffic for any extra purchases made up to 14 days after the client initially clicks on the advertisement.

So, get started by finding out how does Amazon Seller Central work, keep an eye on your core performance metrics, and proceed with joining the Brand Referral Program.

How to Drive Traffic to Amazon?

Keep in mind the most important thing – an AMZ Attribution. As we’ve mentioned, this is a UTM link you should use each time you set up marketing campaigns. It shows where the traffic drives from and proves that you have attracted the leads. These are the most important conditions to be Amazon Referral Bonus Program compliant. 

And here are the channels you can use to attract your potential buyers.

Google PPC

This is the most intuitive option. What’s more, Google PPC ads work in the same way as Amazon listing ads. But keep the critical point in mind – using Google paid ads for Amazon advertising makes sense only when your items are unique. In this case, the users are more likely to start their search in Google, and only then, proceed with Amazon. For popular everyday products, searching right on Amazon is an already established behavior pattern.

Facebook and Instagram Ads

The benefit of this strategy is the opportunity to target new users and grow your business by targeting your ads at highly customized audiences. Facebook also generates look-alike audiences. This is a great option to offer your products to potentially interested users and attract high-quality traffic to Amazon.

Influencer Marketing

This is quite a challenging strategy, but it can bring your leads again and again at no additional costs for you when done right. The essence of the approach is collaborating with a well-known personality in your niche and paying them for sharing the link to a product (with attribution) in their social media profiles. 

In this case, you can take advantage of social proof since many modern users tend to believe the opinion of an influencer.

Your Blog

Overviewing and comparing your products in your blog is one more option for driving sales traffic. This is a good strategy if your users are less driven by emotions but make purchasing decisions under the influence of common sense. In this case, they are likely to dive into details, compare the options and research the use cases.

Affiliate Marketing

Perhaps, this is the easiest way to attract traffic to any website. The only thing you have to do is to join a reliable affiliate network and attract users to your Amazon store from third-party websites. Indeed, you will have to pay a fee to the website owner each time their users purchase from you on Amazon.

Review Marketing

Such a concept may sound weird; still, the feedback your users can provide you with can become strong marketing content. Here is how it works. After you have attracted your leads from third-party sources and finalized the deal, ask them for reviews with the help of SageMailer. 

Such a simple strategy will be improving your efficiency and visibility in Amazon search results. Also, the reviews will help your leads attracted from the web decide on the purchase faster.

Brand Referral Bonus on Amazon: Conclusion

Joining an Amazon Referral Bonus Program is an excellent opportunity to reduce your referral costs and get started with promoting your products outside of Amazon. So give it a try since the conditions are pretty beneficial. 

Also, be smart with your marketing campaigns and carefully calculate the cost per lead and correlate them with your actual savings.