Here is an example. Say you make cotton bedsheets in Panipat and sell them on Amazon.com through FBA. It is the first week of October. Your stock for the holiday season is packed and waiting in your warehouse in India, and Black Friday is on 27 November. That feels like plenty of time.
It isn’t. Amazon’s real deadlines for Black Friday and Cyber Monday fall in October, not November. If your bedsheets are not in an Amazon warehouse in the US by the end of October, they may not show the Prime badge during Black Friday Week. If your Best Deal or Lightning Deal is not submitted by 20 October, it will not run during the sale.
Here is what matters this year, and what we would do in the next four weeks.
The dates
All of these come from Amazon’s Q4 2026 playbook for US sellers.
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| 6 and 7 October | Prime Big Deal Days |
| 14 October | Stock sent through AWD (Amazon’s storage service) must arrive |
| 15 October | Holiday peak fulfilment fees start |
| 20 October | Last day to submit Best Deals and Lightning Deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday |
| 21 October | FBA stock must arrive, if you send it all to one Amazon warehouse |
| 28 October | FBA stock must arrive, if you let Amazon split it across warehouses |
| 27 November | Black Friday |
| 30 November | Cyber Monday |
The two FBA dates depend on how you send your stock. If you choose “minimal shipment splits”, you send everything to one Amazon location and pay a placement fee. The deadline is 21 October. If you choose “Amazon-optimized splits”, you ship to several locations yourself, with no placement fee, and you get until 28 October. That option needs at least five identical cartons of each product.
Amazon also asks you to book your delivery appointment at least seven days before the arrive-by date.
Amazon has not yet announced its exact Black Friday Week dates. In 2024 and 2025, it started on the Thursday eight days before Black Friday. If that happens again, the sale would start on 19 November. That is our guess, not Amazon’s announcement.
If you ship from India
For a brand in Panipat, the October dates come even sooner, because the stock has to cross the world first.
Amazon’s own shipping service for Indian sellers, SEND, carries stock from India to Amazon’s US warehouses and handles customs at both ends. By air, Amazon lists 4 to 8 business days with UPS and 10 to 12 business days with Xhipment. SEND also runs sea shipments from Mumbai and Chennai, but Amazon does not publish a transit time for them. If your stock is not already at sea, plan on air.
Count backwards. To arrive by 28 October on the slower air service, the stock needs to leave around the middle of October, and your appointment must be booked by 21 October. If you want the 21 October date, it has to leave in the first half of October.
One more thing to check before you ship. Since 8 July 2026, products that fall under US product safety rules, such as children’s products, need their certificate data filed electronically when they enter the US. Shipments without it can be held at the border. Our guide to Global Selling has more on selling in the US from India.
Deals: the rules and what they cost now
Deals on Amazon are by invitation. The Deals dashboard in Seller Central shows which of your products Amazon will accept. You need a Professional account, a seller rating of at least 3.5, and products with ratings of 4 stars or more.
A Best Deal must be at least 15% off. A Lightning Deal must be at least 20% off, and on the main sale days it runs for 12 hours. For both, the deal price must be at or below your lowest price in the last 60 days, and at least 5% below your lowest price in the last 30 days. Prices from Prime Big Deal Days in October do not count towards this. So a deal during Prime Big Deal Days will not force your Black Friday price lower.
The fees have changed since last year. In 2025, a Best Deal during Black Friday cost a flat $1,000. This year, each deal costs $100 plus 1.5% of what it sells, up to $5,000. A Best Deal that sells $20,000 of bedsheets would cost $400. Coupons for Black Friday can be submitted only after Amazon announces the event dates.
The deal stock must be in Amazon’s warehouse at least seven days before the deal starts. The deal image comes from your listing, so the main image must be on plain white with no text or logos. An image that breaks the rules can get the deal cancelled.
Stock and storage: the balance
Holiday stock costs more to keep. From October to December, storing standard-size products costs $2.40 per cubic foot a month. From January to September, it is $0.78. So stock that is still in the warehouse in December costs about three times as much to store.
Selling costs more too. Between 15 October and 14 January, FBA fulfilment fees go up by about $0.32 per unit on average. There is also a 3.5% surcharge on fulfilment fees, which Amazon added in April.
Sending too little costs money as well. If you have less than 28 days of stock, Amazon charges a low-inventory fee on every unit sold. Amazon suggests having four to six weeks of stock before a deal event. For the Panipat brand, that means sending enough bedsheets for about a month of strong sales, not the whole winter.
Listings and ads
Check your titles first. Since 27 July 2026, titles on Amazon.com must be 75 characters or fewer in most categories. Amazon is shortening long titles itself, and it gives brand owners 14 days to review the change. Your deal title comes from your product title, so check how it reads now.
Amazon Ads suggests planning the event in three parts: the weeks before, the sale days and the days after. It suggests setting budget rules before the event, so your budgets go up on the busiest days without you changing them by hand.
For your Brand Store, Amazon allows Black Friday messaging only in its Featured Deals layout, no more than seven days before the event, and it must come down within 24 hours after. Submit the new Store version at least 48 hours before it goes live. The full wording rules are in Amazon’s Black Friday advertising guide. One example: an ad can say “Black Friday only” only if the offer lasts 24 hours.
Where we come in
We work with brands that sell on Amazon.com, including Indian brands that ship through Global Selling. For Black Friday, we can check your listings against the new title limit and the deal image rules, make holiday A+ content and a Brand Store for the sale, and plan and run your Amazon Ads for the weeks before and during the event. Everything runs in your own Seller Central account.
We cannot move your 20 October deadline, and neither can anyone else. If your deals are not submitted and your stock is not moving by mid-October, focus on the products that already sell well, and get those right.
