We REFUSED Top Deal (Deal of the Day) for an estimated $1.5 mil of revenue for a day in December for a Best seller product.

Here’s why.

Amazon gave us unacceptable conditions:

Black Friday (BF) and Cyber Monday (CM) are 2 weeks BEFORE the actual Top Deal (TD) day. For these events, we are lowering the product price by 20%. Regardless, Amazon requires an extra 20% discount from our lowest price from BF and CM.

What does it mean?

With the 20% off from the November events, we have to do a 36 % total discount on the product’s price. You can imagine that our profit margin would be ruined.

Another condition was to NOT run lightning deals 2 weeks before the Top Deal (20 Nov. – 3 Dec.) and 2 weeks after it (11-25 Dec.).

From a simple lightning deal day, we generated over $ 450K of revenue and over $175K of profit. We hit the 1st-page visibility on the Deals page because our product is very Q4-friendly.

This is why we decided NOT to run Top Deal but to run 4 lightning deals. The first will be the week of the TD, and the second will be the week after.

What would we win?

A similar amount of traffic without lowering our price by more than 20-22% and without losing most of our profit margin.

Amazon is not a business for the fast run. We run the marathon. Sometimes the best deal in the short run is not the best for the brand’s long-term strategy.