Most Amazon fees only go one way. The Brand Referral Bonus is the exception: when your own marketing outside Amazon sends a shopper who buys, Amazon gives part of the referral fee back. Amazon puts the bonus at an average of 10% of qualifying sales, which for many brands is the difference between an external campaign that pays and one that does not.
This guide covers what the Amazon Brand Referral Bonus is, who can get it, how and when the credit arrives, and how to work out what it is worth per channel. The last part shows how to read the bonus from DataDoe next to the campaigns that earned it. Programme rules and figures were read on Amazon's own pages on 10 November 2026.
Amazon charges a referral fee on every sale. The Brand Referral Bonus, BRB for short, returns a share of the sale value when the shopper arrived from your non-Amazon marketing. In Amazon's words, you earn a bonus when you use non-Amazon advertising to help customers discover products in the Amazon store.
Three points define it:
Amazon's pages describe the programme for US seller brand owners. To take part you need:
Vendors and agencies can use Amazon Attribution for measurement, but the bonus is a seller programme. Sellers without a registered brand are pointed by Amazon to its Associates programme instead, which pays commissions and works differently.
Amazon states an average of 10% of qualifying sales. The actual rate is not one number. It varies with the product category and the sales price, in the same way referral fees do. Amazon gives two examples: clothing at an estimated 11%, and furniture at an estimated 10% on the part of the price up to $200 and 7% on the part above it. The full list by category is on the Brand Referral Bonus help page in Seller Central, and that list is the one to trust for your own catalog.
What counts as a qualifying sale is wider than the product in the ad. Amazon's announcement of the programme says the bonus also applies to other products of your brand that the shopper buys up to 14 days after clicking. An ad for one ASIN can earn a bonus on a different ASIN of the same brand.
The timing surprises most sellers the first time.
So there are two numbers with two dates: the estimate you can see within days, and the credit that lands about two months later. Budget from the first, but book the second. A month with heavy returns will credit less than its estimate suggested.
An Attribution tag is a tracking parameter that Amazon generates and you place in the destination URL of your ad, post or email. When a shopper arrives through it, Amazon knows which campaign, ad group and publisher sent them. Without a tag, a sale from your Google ad looks like any other sale and earns nothing.
The rules that decide whether a sale is credited:
Tags are created in the Amazon Ads console under Amazon Attribution. For how campaigns, ad groups and reports are organized there, and the reading rules for each report, see our guide to Amazon Attribution. This post stays with the money.
The bonus changes the economics of outside traffic in ways that are easy to calculate and often skipped.
Divide the bonus by the attributed sales that earned it. If a campaign shows $8,000 in attributed sales and $760 in estimated bonus, the effective rate is 9.5%. Do this per channel, not for the account, because channels that sell different categories or price points earn different rates.
Subtract the bonus from what you paid the publisher. If that campaign cost $2,000 on Google, the net cost is $1,240. Return on ad spend moves from 4.0 to about 6.5 once the bonus is counted. A channel that looked marginal can clear your threshold, and one that only works with the bonus should be watched for returns.
A sale from a Sponsored Products click and a sale from an outside click bring the same revenue, but only the second earns the bonus. When you compare the two, compare cost per sale after the bonus. Keep the reports apart while you do it: Attribution and Sponsored Ads use different windows, and a sale should be counted in one or the other. Our post on ACoS vs TACoS covers the on-Amazon side.
The figures in these examples are illustrations, not benchmarks.
Since August 2022 Amazon has included the bonus in Amazon Attribution reporting, in the Ads console and through the Amazon Ads API, for enrolled US sellers. DataDoe reads that reporting from your Amazon Ads connection, so the bonus sits in the same place as the clicks and sales that produced it and can be queried from Claude, ChatGPT or another AI client over MCP, through the REST API or in BigQuery.
The bonus is one column on one table:
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brb_bonus_amount on amazon_ads_attribution_performance_by_ad_group_by_date, with one row per day, campaign, ad group and publisher.Four rules for reading it without fooling yourself:
DataDoe does not know what you paid Google, Meta or a creator. For the second and third sums above, give your AI client the spend figures and it will do the division. DataDoe also does not create Attribution tags or campaigns. That stays in the Amazon Ads console.
The last question works because the Attribution tables sit beside the profit tables in one schema. For what profit per product has to include before the bonus is added, see true margin per SKU. For everything else an AI client can read in the ad account, see Amazon Ads in Claude and ChatGPT.
A programme that credits brand-registered US sellers with a share of sales that come from their non-Amazon marketing. Amazon states an average of 10% of qualifying sales.
As a credit that offsets referral fees on future sales. Amazon states a two-month processing time between the sale and the credit.
Yes. Only sales that Amazon can trace to an Attribution tag qualify.
No. Amazon advertising is excluded. The bonus applies to traffic from outside the Amazon store.
Yes, if each channel has its own ad group and tag. In DataDoe the estimated bonus is reported per ad group and publisher, so an AI client can group it by channel.
DataDoe is the Amazon data layer for AI agents, with Seller Central, Vendor Central and Amazon Ads data in 130+ tables. It costs $97 a month with a 14-day free trial. Connect Amazon Ads, check that the Attribution tables are enabled, and ask which outside channel earned the most bonus last quarter.