60 days that stopped counting

In June, the rule was that your own price history was the thing most likely to kill a Q4 deal. As of this cycle, one event no longer counts against the other — and the submission window for the first one closes today..

Start with the mechanic everyone plans around. Before Amazon approves a Best Deal, Lightning Deal or Prime Exclusive Discount, it reads your recent price history and uses the lowest price in a 30-to-60-day window to set how deep the next discount is allowed to go.

Which produced the standard Q4 trap. Run a real discount in October and the low price sits in your history when November's submission is assessed. The deeper you went in October, the less room November had — because "deep" is measured against a price you already dropped to. Sellers have solved this for years by picking one event and holding price for the other.

Amazon changed that for this cycle. In its holiday announcement, promotional prices run during Prime Big Deal Days are excluded from the 30-day and 60-day lookback window and will not affect the maximum deal price for Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday.

Read that as a sequencing change rather than a discount. The October event stopped being a tax on the November one.

Now the part Amazon did not answer. The exclusion is written against promotional prices. A seller asked on the public announcement thread whether that covers only submitted deal prices, or any reduced price shown during the event window. There is no answer on the thread.

Until there is, treat the carve-out as covering the deal you submitted and nothing else — because a strikethrough you ran on your own, outside a deal, is the one thing nobody has confirmed is excluded.

What is not changing. Eligibility requirements are the same as last cycle. Deal fees are the same as Prime Day: $100 upfront per promotion plus 1.5% of promotional sales, capped at $5,000. The $50 early-submission discount is gone on both events — August 5 for October, September 5 for November.

And the cost side moved while the fees held. Holiday peak fulfilment runs October 15 through January 14 at roughly $0.32 a unit above non-peak, charged on ship date, stacked on top of the 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge. Both events sit inside that window. A deal you modelled on summer fulfilment cost is not the deal you are submitting.

November's window is still open. Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday deal submissions run to October 20. The early discount has passed; the window has not.

Pan-EU picked up a country. From September 3, every product enrolled in Pan-EU FBA needs an active offer on Amazon.nl, with Belgium following at enrollment on February 26, 2027. Products with no existing detail page on those stores are excepted. Missing it puts Pan-EU eligibility at risk, which changes fulfilment economics in the markets you did choose.

Demand softened into the window. US retail and food services sales fell 0.6% in July, the sharpest monthly drop since May 2025. Deal depth decisions built on 2025 conversion are being made against a weaker July print.

Owner: whoever submits deals. If that is you, do it before your first call.

Do not start by building a SKU list. Amazon already built one.

Open the Deals dashboard and read the ASINs it shows as eligible for the October event. Eligibility is the binding constraint here — a SKU you cannot submit is not a decision, and Amazon has already done that filtering against your account.

From that list, mark only the ASINs you deliberately held out of October in order to protect a November price.

That is the entire population the carve-out changed. For most catalogues it is fewer than ten, and you already know which ones they are without opening a spreadsheet, because holding them back was a decision somebody made out loud.

Those get submitted today, or they get a written reason not to. The reason that existed last cycle no longer does.

One check before you submit. If you had planned a self-run strikethrough during the event rather than a submitted deal, put it inside a deal or hold the price. Only promotional prices are confirmed excluded, and nobody has defined how far that reaches.

Then park the rest. Peak-adjusted contribution on your November deals — $0.32 plus the 3.5% surcharge instead of your summer fee — is real work and it is not today's. That window runs to October 20, and it deserves a proper afternoon rather than the twenty minutes you have this morning.

TRANSLATION

The lookback did not get easier. One event got carved out of it, for this cycle, in language Amazon has not yet fully defined. The operators who gain are the ones who stop treating October and November as one budget with one discount in it — and who submit inside a deal rather than beside one.

See you Friday.

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— Dan