Amazon Black Friday Deals Close October 20

Deal submissions for Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday close on October 20. That is the easy part of this post, and it is the part everyone already has in a calendar.

The hard part is that Amazon has largely decided what your Black Friday deal price is allowed to be, and it decided using prices you set weeks ago. If you ran a coupon this month, or dropped your price for a weekend in August, you may have already capped your November deal without knowing it. This is why deals come back rejected with a message that explains nothing.

There are two reference prices, not one

Almost every wrong answer about Amazon discounting comes from collapsing two separate numbers into one. They are computed differently and they behave in opposite ways.

The first is the Was Price, the struck-through number on your detail page. Amazon defines it as "the median non-promotional price customers paid for a product over the last 90 days." Median. The middle value of ninety. It is a robust statistic, which means a handful of cheap days cannot shift it.

The second is the deal-price gate, an internal ceiling on what Amazon will let you set as a deal price. Two conditions, both of which have to hold:

• Your deal price must be at or below the lowest price in the past 60 days
• Your deal price must be at least 5% below the lowest price in the past 30 days

That is a minimum, not a median. One cheap day sets a ceiling for the next two months.

So your Was Price can look perfectly healthy while your deal is refused, and the two facts are not in conflict. They are measuring different things. A median ignores your outliers. The gate is built entirely out of them.

What actually feeds that lowest price

Amazon staff have described it on the seller forums as "the lowest customer bought price for the ASIN in that period including all deals, promotional, and sale prices across all sellers."

Two things in that sentence cost real money.

Coupons count. Amazon has confirmed this directly. A coupon is an order-level discount that never touches your shelf price, and it still moves your gate. A 30% coupon in September can block a 20% deal in November. Nothing on your listing will ever show you that this happened.

"Across all sellers." If anyone else is on your ASIN and went cheap, their price is your ceiling too. You can do everything right and still be gated by a reseller clearing stock.

One thing Amazon has never put in writing is whether Buy X Get Y counts toward the gate. Everything published points to yes: the gate lists no exclusions at all, coupons are confirmed to count and work the same way mechanically, and Buy X Get Y is named as an exclusion only for the Was Price. Treat it as counting, and build a plan that survives either answer. Being wrong here costs you a deal; being cautious costs you a few percent.

The exception that makes October free

This is the most useful sentence Amazon published this season, and most sellers have never read it. From the Holiday 2026 announcement:

"Prime Big Deal Days promotional prices are excluded from the 30-day and 60-day lookback window and won't affect the maximum deal price required for Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday deals."

A genuine Prime Big Deal Days discount costs you nothing in November. Amazon skips those days as though they never happened. If you have been holding back in October to protect Black Friday, you have been protecting yourself from a risk that does not exist.

Two limits, and they matter. The sentence is written for deals inside Amazon's Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday event. A discount you schedule on your own dates outside the event window is not obviously covered by it. And it names Prime Big Deal Days specifically, so do not stretch it to cover a September clearance, a coupon, or a sale you ran because a competitor did.

The quiet price cut is the expensive one

Here is the part that runs against instinct. Since May 18 this year, Amazon treats "price discounts that are not advertised to customers as promotions" as non-promotional sales, which means they are included in the Was Price.

Read that backwards. Quietly editing your price down for a week does more lasting damage than running a badged promotion at exactly the same depth. The quiet cut drags your 90-day median down. The badged promotion usually does not. Most sellers assume the opposite, because the quiet cut feels smaller and more private.

There is a second rule underneath it, from the same May update. If more than half the days in a product's 90-day price history sit below the non-promotional median, Amazon stops excluding promotions and recalculates the Was Price using all sales, promotional ones included.

The threshold is 46 days out of 90. Below it, your promotions are invisible to the reference price. Above it, the reference price collapses toward what you have actually been charging, and the savings badge shoppers see shrinks with it. Occasional discounting is genuinely free. Permanent discounting is not, and the bill arrives quietly, as a smaller crossed-out number.

What to do between now and October 20

Read the maximum deal price Amazon shows you. It sits per ASIN in the Deals dashboard in Seller Central. It is the only authoritative number. Any price history you pull yourself, from any tool, is a proxy: outside data records the offer price, while Amazon's rule speaks about the price customers paid. Those two diverge exactly where coupons and order-level discounts live. Checking the dashboard takes a minute and ends the argument.

Work backwards from the event, not forwards from today. A promotion at d% off sets a gate at price × (1 − d), and the next deal has to land at or below 0.95 × that. Decide your Black Friday depth first, then calculate what you can afford to run before it. Doing it in the other order is how sellers discover in late October that their own September enthusiasm has boxed them in.

Never run anything deeper before the event than the event itself. If your October price was better than your Black Friday price, Black Friday is not an offer, whatever the badge says. That is a merchandising failure that exists independently of any Amazon rule.

Decide the follow-up discount now. Your Black Friday deal price becomes the gate for the next 60 days, which covers December and most of January. If you are planning a post-Christmas push, work it out in the same sitting, not in week two of January when the numbers no longer cooperate.

Check the rest of the eligibility bar. Products need a minimum 2.5 star rating with at least five reviews, and products with high return rates are ineligible. Your deal price also has to be at or below what a reputable retailer outside Amazon is charging.

Check variations one at a time. Family members drift apart on price, and the gate is calculated per ASIN. The hero looking fine tells you nothing about the other six.

Two practical notes. The $50 early-submission discount closed on September 5, so submitting now costs the full fee, which is $100 per promotion plus 1.5% of promotional sales, capped at $5,000. And you do not choose your slot. Amazon reveals scheduled deal dates in Seller Central at least a week before the run, so any plan built around a specific date is making an assumption worth flagging.

The underlying problem

None of these rules are secret. They are just spread across four announcements, two forum threads and a help page, written at different times, using words that sound like each other. "Reference price", "Was Price", "lowest price", "maximum deal price" are four different things, and the documentation does not go out of its way to tell you which is which.

The practical consequence is that the decision limiting your Black Friday deal usually gets made in September, by someone who was thinking about September. Nobody carries a 60-day price ledger in their head, and by the time the rejection arrives the cause is six weeks in the past.

Frequently asked questions

When is the deadline to submit Amazon Black Friday deals in 2026? October 20, 2026. Submissions opened on July 8. The $50 early-submission discount closed on September 5, so deals submitted now pay the full fee, which is $100 per promotion plus 1.5% of promotional sales, capped at $5,000. Amazon confirms scheduled deal dates in Seller Central at least a week before the deal runs, so you do not pick your own slot.

Why was my Amazon deal rejected? Usually because the price does not clear the deal gate. Amazon requires a deal price at or below your lowest price in the past 60 days, and at least 5% below your lowest price in the past 30 days. Any discount inside that window lowers the bar you then have to beat, including coupons and prices set by other sellers on the same ASIN. Separate eligibility rules also apply: a minimum 2.5 star rating with at least five reviews, no high return rate, and a price at or below a reputable retailer outside Amazon.

Do coupons affect Amazon deal eligibility? Yes. Amazon has confirmed that coupons feed the lowest-price calculation, even though a coupon never changes your shelf price. A 30% coupon in one month can block a 20% deal in the next. A coupon also cannot run alongside a deal on the same ASIN.

Will a Prime Big Deal Days discount hurt my Black Friday deal price? No. Amazon excludes Prime Big Deal Days promotional prices from the 30-day and 60-day lookback window, and says they will not affect the maximum deal price required for Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday deals. That exclusion is written for deals inside Amazon's event, so do not assume it covers a discount you schedule on your own dates outside the event window.

What is the difference between Was Price and the maximum deal price? Was Price is the median non-promotional price customers paid over the last 90 days, and it is the basis the strikethrough and savings percentage are measured from. The maximum deal price is a ceiling built from your single lowest price across the last 30 and 60 days. A median ignores your outliers; the ceiling is made entirely of them, which is why a healthy Was Price does not guarantee an approved deal.

How do I find my maximum deal price on Amazon? Open the Deals dashboard in Seller Central and read the maximum deal price shown for each ASIN. It is the only authoritative figure. Third-party price trackers record the offer price rather than what customers actually paid, so they can prove a price did drop but can never prove that nothing discounted the net price.

Does discounting too often lower my Was Price? It can. Since May 18, 2026, if more than half the days in a product's 90-day price history sit below the non-promotional median, Amazon recalculates Was Price using all sales, promotional ones included. The threshold is 46 days out of 90. An unadvertised price cut counts toward Was Price in any case, while a badged promotion usually does not.

That is the kind of thing software should be watching for you. Seller Sphere keeps your price history, your promotions and your deal windows in one place, so the question "what can I actually discount to in November, and what did last month cost me" has an answer before the deadline rather than after it.