Subscribe and Save
Margin Forecaster.

Subscribe and Save lets shoppers set up a recurring delivery of your product and receive a discount in exchange for the commitment. As the seller you choose a funding level for that discount, with options of 0, 5, 10, 15, or 20 percent. On top of whatever you fund, Amazon adds its own 5 percent discount for customers who receive five or more Subscribe and Save items in a single delivery. You only pay for the portion you fund. The recurring nature is the point. A subscriber keeps buying without you paying to reacquire them each time.

Your cost is only the discount percentage you choose to fund, applied to the selling price, on every recurring order. If you fund 10 percent on a 30 dollar product, you give up about 3 dollars of margin per delivery. The extra 5 percent that customers can earn for large multi item deliveries is funded by Amazon, not you, so it does not come out of your margin. This calculator shows the exact dollar impact on your profit per order and across the life of a subscriber.

It depends on your margin and how long subscribers tend to stay. A common starting point is 5 to 10 percent for consumable products that people reorder on a predictable cycle, since the recurring revenue quickly outweighs the per order discount. Thin margin products may only support 5 percent or none at all. Products people buy on a long cycle, or rarely repurchase, get less benefit from a deep discount. Use the break even number in this tool to see how many deliveries a subscriber needs to stay before the discount pays for itself.

Only the part you fund. If you set a 10 percent seller funded discount, that 10 percent is your cost on each recurring order. The additional 5 percent that customers can unlock by receiving five or more Subscribe and Save items in one delivery is paid by Amazon. So a customer might see a 15 percent total discount while your margin is only reduced by the 10 percent you chose to fund.

Subscribe and Save tends to pay off for consumable products with a predictable reorder cycle, where one subscriber generates many deliveries over time. The math turns on retention. If a subscriber stays for more deliveries than the break even number this tool calculates, the recurring revenue more than covers the discount you funded. For products people buy once or rarely repurchase, a recurring discount mostly just lowers the margin on sales you would have made anyway.

Amazon adds a 5 percent discount, funded by Amazon rather than the seller, when a customer receives five or more Subscribe and Save items scheduled for delivery on the same day. Those items can be mixed across brands. It is an incentive Amazon uses to push shoppers toward larger, consolidated subscription deliveries. For you as a seller it means a customer can see a larger total discount than the portion you funded, which makes your offer more attractive at no extra cost to you.