Amazon Born to Run: How the Program Works, the Retention Fee, and When to Use It

The launch PO you get to size yourself

You have a new ASIN ready to launch, an ad budget committed behind it, and a standard purchase order from Amazon that is too small to support either. Amazon normally orders against sales history, and a new ASIN has none, so the first POs come in thin and the launch can run out of stock while your ads are still spending.

Amazon's Born to Run program is the first-party answer to that problem. (Search for the bare phrase and you'll get the Bruce Springsteen album; this guide is about the Amazon Vendor Central program.) It lets a first-party vendor set the size of the opening PO for a new ASIN, and in exchange the vendor takes on the cost of whatever hasn't sold when the program's 10-week window closes. Our Born to Run glossary entry has the short definition. This guide covers what decides whether the program pays off: what the retention fee costs you, how to choose between the two options for unsold units, when Born to Run is worth the risk, and how to tell whether you're on pace before the window closes.

What Born to Run does

On a standard launch, Amazon decides how much to buy. With Born to Run, you submit a Launch Buy Quantity (LBQ) for the ASIN, Amazon issues the purchase order against it, and the units then have 10 weeks, or 70 days, to sell through.

The program is invite-only. In Vendor Central it sits under Orders, then Vendor-Initiated Orders, then Born to Run, and it only shows up on accounts Amazon has invited, so if you can't find it in your Orders menu, your account hasn't been invited yet. Print2WebCorp describes the enrollment flow from there: select the ASIN, enter the LBQ, submit it for review, ship to the fulfillment center, and then drive sales with advertising.

If you came from Seller Central, there's nothing to look for on that side. Born to Run is a first-party program, and Seller Central accounts can't use it.

Eligibility, in one pass

Before you build a launch plan around the program, check the ASIN and the account against the criteria the published program descriptions list:

• Unit cost of at least $5. Jungle Scout sets the minimum at $5 per unit at cost.
• A $50,000 ceiling. Jungle Scout puts the cap on the LBQ's value, while our glossary entry describes it as the total cost of your active Born to Run orders combined. Under either reading, a launch above $50,000 at cost needs a smaller LBQ or a different route.
• 90 days on Amazon Advertising. Acorn-i lists at least 90 days of using the Amazon Advertising platform as a condition. Jungle Scout notes that Amazon used to require vendors to put 10% of the order value into advertising and has since dropped that rule, though Amazon still recommends running ads behind the launch.
• No heavy, bulky, or dangerous goods. Jungle Scout excludes them.
• A new item. Acorn-i describes the ASIN as needing to count as new to Amazon, meaning an item Amazon hasn't fulfilled before, even if the product itself isn't new to the market.

The clock and the fee

The window is 10 weeks, but when it starts is less settled. Print2WebCorp describes a 20-day period after the product arrives at the fulfillment center before the clock starts, while other accounts have it starting the day the ASIN is in stock, with no grace period. That's a 20-day difference in selling time, so confirm the start date with your Vendor Manager before you size the LBQ, and until they do, plan as if the clock starts the day the ASIN is in stock.

At the end of the window, unsold units go one of two ways:

• Retention. Amazon keeps the unsold units and you pay a retention fee of 25% of their cost.
• Return. Amazon sends the unsold units back. Per BellaVix, you refund Amazon 100% of the product cost of those units and pay a 10% shipping and handling fee on top.

You can't wait to see which one turns out cheaper. BellaVix describes choosing one of the two options during enrollment, before the window has started, so the choice belongs in the launch plan alongside the LBQ.

What each option costs

You can't compare the 25% and 10% figures directly, because the return option also hands the inventory back to you. Here's a worked example; the numbers are invented to show the method, so plug in your own.

• Unit cost: $20. LBQ: 2,000 units, or $40,000 at cost, inside the $50,000 ceiling.
• Units sold in the 10 weeks: 1,400. Units left: 600, which is $12,000 at cost.
• Retention: 25% of $12,000, so you pay $3,000 and Amazon keeps the 600 units.
• Return: you refund the $12,000 and pay a 10% fee of $1,200, for $13,200 out, and the 600 units come back to you.

Return comes out ahead only if you can turn those 600 units into more than $10,200 once they're back, after the cost of receiving them and selling them through another channel. That's 85% of their cost, and the ratio holds at any scale, because retention costs 25% of the leftover cost and return costs 110% of it minus whatever you recover. Unless you already have a channel that clears inventory at close to cost, plan the launch with retention as the downside case.

The decision frame

Jungle Scout frames the program's value as removing the wait for sales history on a new product, and Print2WebCorp recommends reserving it for launches where inventory depth decides the outcome, such as flagship launches, seasonal peaks, and major promotional pushes. Three things you already know at launch tell you whether this ASIN is one of those.

1. Unit cost and margin. Under retention, every unsold unit costs you 25% of its cost. Set that worst-case figure against the margin you make on the units that do sell, and if a plausible leftover share would wipe out the launch margin, size the LBQ down until it doesn't. Our Net PPM and CRaP guide covers how Amazon reads the margin on an ASIN once it's live.
2. Committed ad spend. Sell-through in a 10-week window depends on the traffic you buy, and since the advertising rule was dropped, nothing in the program forces you to buy any. Size the LBQ to what your committed advertising can move in 10 weeks, and hold off on setting the LBQ until the budget is decided.
3. How sure you are of the forecast. Print2WebCorp suggests using Amazon Brand Analytics to check search frequency rank for the keywords the ASIN will target, along with how recently launched competitor ASINs have performed. If that research gives you a narrow range, Born to Run lets you stock to it. If the range is wide, size the LBQ near the low end or let Amazon's own POs handle the launch.

If the margin holds up, the ad budget is committed, and you trust the forecast, Born to Run protects the launch from running out of stock in its first weeks. If the forecast is a guess and the ad budget is still being negotiated, you're likely to end up paying the 25% fee, and the standard PO route is the safer way to launch.

Tracking pace inside the 10 weeks

Once the PO ships, you need to know whether you're on pace while there's still time to do something about it. Print2WebCorp recommends monitoring sell-through weekly, and a simple version looks like this:

1. Divide the LBQ by 10 to get the weekly pace the window requires. In the example, 2,000 units over 10 weeks is 200 a week.
2. Each week, compare cumulative units sold with the cumulative pace.
3. Project the leftover: units remaining minus the current weekly rate times the weeks left.
4. Multiply the projected leftover by 25% of unit cost to see the retention fee you're heading toward.
5. If that figure is growing, raise ad spend on the ASIN or line up a promotion while the window still has weeks to run.

What Vendor Central will not give you

You run the weekly check above by hand, because the console doesn't do any of it for you.

• No pace view. Nothing in Vendor Central sets units sold against days remaining in the Born to Run window, so you build that comparison yourself each week.
• No fee projection. The console won't tell you what retention fee your current pace implies, so if you aren't tracking it yourself, the fee is the first sign that you were behind.
• A weekly repeat. The comparison only works if someone pulls the sales numbers every week for the whole window, for every enrolled ASIN.

InsightLeap handles the data side of this continuously, with product-level Vendor Central sales, inventory, and PO data and sellable inventory trends per ASIN, so the weekly pace check starts from numbers that are already collected. Whatever tool you use, write down the required weekly pace the day the Born to Run PO ships, and check actual sales against it every week until the window closes.

Related terms

• Born to Run: the definition, eligibility, and where the program sits in Vendor Central.
• Purchase Order (PO): the order Amazon normally issues against its own demand forecast, and the one a Born to Run request sizes from your LBQ.
• Chargebacks: the compliance penalties Amazon applies to vendor shipments, worth reviewing before you ship a large launch PO. Our guide to shipping a purchase order to Amazon walks through getting it in cleanly.