Amazon has been promoting their Brand Referral Bonus. The idea is that, when you drive traffic from external sources (e.g. Facebook or Google) to your product listing on Amazon, you can earn money even when the visitors don't buy your product -- if they buy another product on Amazon. For example, Amazon says, if you drive $1,000 in sales on Amazon by sending traffic from external sources, you will earn a bonus worth $100 (10% of sales) through Brand Referral Bonus. To be eligible for BRB, you have to use the special URLs generated through Amazon Attribution.

I've been running Google Ads campaigns for some time now, using the Amazon Attribution URLs. When I look at the Amazon Attribution reports, they say that I have earned a significant amount of Brand Referral Bonus money.

The thing is: the Brand Referral Bonus is not real. It is never actually paid out to sellers. I'll explain.

I first started earning the BRB back in late 2022. Recently, I got curious, and wanted to verify that Amazon had paid it out to me. I went into the Payments | Transaction View in Seller Central, and searched and searched. I couldn't find anything. There was no evidence of any payment or credit to me in the Transaction View. So I contacted Seller Support.

Their reply: "This won't be visible in the Invoices that you pay because this is a Bonus and Not a Credit. It will Only and Only be visible in the path that is given "Seller Central" > "Brands" > "Brand Referral Bonus" page. There is No other place where this would be visible. Hence, Please refer the said path if You wish to see it."

Sure enough, when I went to the Brand Referral Bonus page, I was able to download a spreadsheet that says that I earned $x amount. But all the spreadsheet essentially says is that I earned $x amount through y sales on Amazon. There is no actual evidence of that amount of money being credited to my account (in any form, e.g. as a credit against my spending on Amazon Advertising, or something else).

Here's the thing: if Amazon was actually paying out the Brand Referral Bonus to Amazon sellers, it would be in the Payments | Transaction View page in Seller Central (or the Payments | Advertising Invoice History page) which is the entire transactional record of our financial dealings with Amazon.

So: the Brand Referral Bonus is not real. You may have good reasons to use Amazon Attribution for the external traffic you send to Amazon, but the Brand Referral Bonus is not one of them.

(I'm open to being proven wrong on any of my statements above -- if you have used Brand Referral Bonus, please do reply with your thoughts, and point me in the direction of where I can verify that my BRB earnings were actually paid out to me.)