Promotions in your Amazon settlement: what is free shipping, and what a real discount costs
Many orders in an Amazon settlement carry a negative promotion amount, and at first it looks as if you gave a discount. In most cases you did not: it is how free shipping is booked, and it costs nothing. Real discounts, coupons and deals are different: on top of the price reduction, they come with fees.
We looked at 12 sellers' settlements from December 2025 to October 2026, order item by order item. 86% of the promotion lines were free shipping. Only one seller gave real price discounts in any volume, and there the discount plus the fees took 10% of the price of the discounted units.
The data
We used the shipped orders in the settlements: for each order item, the product price, VAT, shipping charge, promotion and Amazon fees. Posted dates fall between 1 December 2025 and 24 October 2026.
| Order items | With a promotion | |
|---|---|---|
| total (12 sellers) | 6,535 | 757 (11.6%) |
| free shipping | 653 | |
| real price discount | 104 |
Free shipping: two lines that cancel out
When the buyer gets free shipping, the settlement shows two lines: the shipping charge as income, as if the buyer had paid it, and a promotion of the same size as a deduction. Together they are zero.
Of the 757 promotion lines, 653 were exactly the shipping charge including VAT. That came to EUR 1,791.95, GBP 8.39 and USD 103.42, and it cost none of the sellers anything. If you add up the promotion lines without taking shipping out, you overstate your discounts many times over.
Real discounts: one seller, one product
There was a price discount on 104 order items, EUR 614.23 in total. 100 of them belong to a single seller who sells one product; the other four are spread across three sellers. Of the 12 sellers, only one used discounts regularly.
At that seller, 100 of 458 order items (21.8%) were sold at a discount, between 22 December 2025 and 18 July 2026.
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| gross price of the discounted units | EUR 6,571.58 |
| price discount | EUR 564.69 (8.6%) |
| coupon participation fee (5 times, EUR 4) | EUR 20.00 |
| coupon performance-based fee (5 times, EUR 5.23-15.76) | EUR 44.03 |
| deal participation fee (5 lines) | EUR 24.00 |
| deal performance-based fee (5 lines) | EUR 3.62 |
| total | EUR 656.34 (10.0%) |
That is EUR 6.56 per unit. The fees (EUR 91.65) were 14% of it; the rest was the discount itself. Against the seller's total gross sales of EUR 27,823.93, it is 2.4%.
The settlement does not say which discount came from a coupon and which from a deal, so the two can only be separated on the fee lines.
The referral fee is charged on the discounted price
On the discounted items, the referral fee was 15.0% of the price after the discount, exactly the same as on items without a discount. Measured against the full price it was only 13.5%. You do not pay a referral fee on the amount you take off.
What we could not measure: whether it brought extra sales
At this seller, buyers paid EUR 60.07 on average for the discounted units after the discount, and EUR 59.36 for the others. So the price before the discount was higher on the discounted units (EUR 65.72), and buyers paid about the same. Whether the discount brought more sales cannot be read from the settlement: that needs traffic and conversion for the periods with and without the discount.
What to do
- Separate shipping in the settlement. If the promotion is exactly the shipping charge including VAT, it is free shipping, not a discount. Count only what is left as a price discount.
- Add the fees to the cost of a discount. Coupon and deal participation and performance-based fees appear among the service fee lines, not on the order. For us they added another 16% on top of the discount (EUR 91.65 on EUR 564.69).
- Check whether it brought sales. Compare daily sales and conversion in the discount period with the period before. We wrote about this in our conversion article. If sales did not rise, the discount only took from your margin.
- Put it into your margin. A discount reduces what is left just like VAT, fees and advertising. We worked out what remains after all of these in our article on advertising cheap products.
Why the numbers are not exact
- The real discount data come essentially from one seller and one product. They do not tell you how large discounts usually are, or what coupon fees usually come to.
- The settlement does not distinguish coupons, deals and other promotions; only the fee lines show which one ran.
- 44 of the discounted items carried a referral fee line; the referral rate comes from those 44.
- Performance-based fees arrive per settlement, not per order, so we cannot tie them to individual orders.
If you see a large promotion total in your settlement, first check how much of it is shipping. What is left is the real discount, and the fees come on top of that.