Lightning Deals and 7-Day Deals, played to win.

Lightning Deals and 7-Day Deals are the only promotional mechanics that get your ASIN on the Today's Deals page — the single highest-traffic merchandising surface Amazon operates for sellers. They're also the only promotions that come with an upfront fee, lock part of your inventory for the deal window, and can be cancelled mid-flight if you sell out faster than expected.

This episode walks through how each one actually works, what the placement is worth in different contexts, and the configuration discipline that turns a deal slot into incremental revenue rather than a discounted-margin tax.

The two formats, mechanically

Lightning Deals

A Lightning Deal runs for a 4–8 hour window, scheduled by Amazon (you submit availability windows; Amazon picks the slot). During the window, the deal appears on the Today's Deals page with a countdown timer and a percent-claimed progress bar. When the timer ends, or the claim cap is hit, the deal stops.

7-Day Deals

A 7-Day Deal is the longer-format sibling — a discount that runs for a full week, surfaced on Today's Deals throughout the window. It's typically reserved for higher-ticket categories where shoppers take longer to decide, and for seasonal pushes where a 4-hour window would leave traffic on the table.

Both formats carry a per-deal fee (€150 for a standard Lightning Deal slot at time of writing; higher for Prime Day and Black Friday slots; 7-Day Deals are priced separately). The fee is non-refundable whether the deal sells out, runs flat, or gets cancelled for an eligibility failure.

Eligibility — the floor most operators don't re-check

The deal-eligibility checks are the strictest of any promotion type:

• Price floor. The deal price must be at least 15% below the lowest price in the last 30 days, and below any other competing offers on the same ASIN.
• Reviews. Minimum 4 reviews with a 3.5+ average star rating.
• Buy Box. You must own the Buy Box at the time the deal launches.
• Inventory. Amazon calculates a minimum inventory level based on projected deal velocity. Falling below it during the window triggers an early cancellation.
• Policy. No active suppression, no policy warnings, no restricted-keyword flags. A new warning surfaced overnight will cancel a deal the next morning.

Apply the 48-hour eligibility check from Episode 01 religiously to Lightning Deals. A cancelled deal still charges the fee and burns the slot.

Pricing the deal

The 15% minimum discount is the floor, not the target. In practice, Lightning Deals that land in the 20–25% range consistently convert better than those at exactly 15% — the countdown timer and the progress bar are urgency cues that only fire properly when the discount looks worth the rush.

Two pricing traps to avoid:

• The shallow deal. A 15% Lightning Deal competes against 20%+ deals on the same page. Shoppers scroll past it. You pay the slot fee and harvest very little incremental traffic.
• The hero-product deep deal. A 40% Lightning Deal on a hero ASIN that was already selling well discounts demand you already had. The Today's Deals page traffic gets there too late to repay the margin you gave up.

Inventory: the rule that decides whether the deal works

Lightning Deals that sell out in the first hour are the single most common cause of post-deal pain. The deal stops early, the ASIN may lose the Buy Box during reconciliation, and post-deal organic rank drops because shoppers arriving in hours 3–8 bounce off the listing.

For Lightning Deals, the inventory cover rule from Episode 01 — 120% of expected demand — is the absolute floor. For Prime Day Lightning Deal slots, 150% is closer to safe. The cost of a unit of unsold inventory at the deal price is almost always smaller than the cost of a cancelled deal at peak traffic.

Slotting — when the deal actually runs

Amazon picks the deal window from the availability you submit. The slot you get matters:

• Tuesday afternoon, 14:00–18:00: low deal page traffic, low incremental lift, useful for testing.
• Thursday or Friday evening: meaningfully higher traffic.
• Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Prime Day:5–15× the regular slot traffic, and the only slots that consistently repay the higher event-slot fee.

Save your peak slots for hero ASINs with deep inventory and defensible margin. Test slots in regular weeks before you commit to a Prime Day deal — you want to know your real conversion rate at the deal price before the lights come on.

Measurement

Pull two reports after every Lightning Deal:

• The deal performance report — units, revenue, slot fee, net contribution.
• The 14-day post-deal session and conversion data on the ASIN, compared to the 14-day pre-period.

A deal that paid for itself on the day but flattened the next two weeks' organic conversion is not a success. Lightning Deals are an organic-rank instrument as much as a revenue instrument, and the lift on the day is only one half of the read.