The Amazon Bonus Hiding in Plain Sight

If you send outside traffic to Amazon, Amazon will pay you for it. The catch is a piece of setup that's easy to skip.

By Jade Mossop, Global Creative Marketing Director

Here's money hiding in plain sight. If you drive traffic to your Amazon listings from outside Amazon, from Google, social, email or a creator, Amazon will credit you a bonus on those sales. It's called the Brand Referral Bonus, and if you're not set up for it, you're simply not getting it.

It goes uncollected when the traffic gets sent blind. A Google ad points straight at the listing, the sale happens, and Amazon has no idea you sent it. No tracking, no credit, no bonus. You just did Amazon's customer acquisition for free.

The fix is one tool: Amazon Attribution. It's free for brand-registered sellers, and it does two jobs at once. First, it finally shows you which external channels actually drive Amazon sales. The data Amazon normally keeps to itself. Second, routing those tagged links qualifies the sales for the Brand Referral Bonus. Amazon states the bonus averages around 10% of the qualifying sale price, though the exact rate varies by product category and is paid as a credit against your referral fees, not as cash.

Sit with that. You were going to run the ad anyway. Now the same ad is tracked, so you learn what works, and credited, so Amazon effectively reduces the referral fee it just charged you on that sale. The extra work is almost nothing. The links simply need to carry the right tags.

Then there's how the link is built. A tagged link still leaks if it dumps someone on your storefront, or on a search page, or into the Amazon mobile site when they've got the app installed. Deeplinking closes that gap: the link carries your tags and lands on the exact product detail page, opening in the Amazon app on mobile rather than a browser. Fewer steps between the click and the buy button, and the tag survives the journey. A tagged link that lands in the wrong place gets you the data and loses you the sale.

There's a strategic kicker, and it's the reason I care about this more than the credit. External traffic that converts is sales velocity, and velocity is what Amazon's organic ranking responds to. So the same tagged, deeplinked click does three things at once: it earns the bonus, it tells you which channel is working, and it feeds the velocity signal that lifts the listing for everyone who was never going to see your ad. Off-Amazon spend stops being a leak and starts being rank.

The move for you: if you're sending any external traffic to Amazon, route every link through Amazon Attribution and deeplink it to the exact product page before you spend another dollar. You're already paying for the traffic. This is the part where you stop leaving the credit, the data, and the rank on the table.