Amazon product launch: how to launch a product on Amazon UK in 90 days

Every new product on Amazon starts with no reviews, no sales history and no organic rank. A launch is the planned period in which you pay to fix that. Done well, it ends with a product that converts, ranks and sells without launch-level spending. Done badly, it ends with a product that only sells while you are paying for it.

This guide covers the best way to launch in one list, what to do before you list, the UK launch tools Amazon offers today, the question our older posts answered two ways (reviews or advertising first), and how to set a launch budget from your margin.

The best way to launch a product on Amazon

The best way to launch a product on Amazon UK in 2026, in our experience, is to make the product ready to convert before you buy any traffic, and then let conversion decide how fast you spend. In order:

1. Get the basics right first: a margin that can carry launch costs, quality-checked stock, and a listing ready to convert.
2. Claim what Amazon offers new brands. Check eligibility for New Seller Incentives and the New Selection Programme (2026) before you list, because some benefits depend on when you register your brand and list your first product³⁴.
3. Get reviews through Amazon’s own route. Enrol in pre-launch Vine so that reviews are visible on launch day². Never pay or reward anyone for a review⁹.
4. Start advertising on day one, narrow, on exact-match terms that describe the product precisely, plus an automatic campaign to find more.
5. Scale with conversion, not the calendar, and stop paying launch prices once the product converts and ranks.
6. Budget from your margin, with an end date, so the launch is an investment rather than a habit.

The rest of this guide takes each step in turn.

What a launch has to achieve

Amazon does not publish how its search ranking works, so be wary of anyone who claims to know the formula. What we see across the accounts we manage is consistent, though: products that convert well from the traffic they get tend to rise, and products that don’t, tend not to. A launch therefore has three jobs:

1. Earn trust. Reviews, a rating and images that answer the shopper’s questions.
2. Prove conversion. Enough sales from relevant searches to show the listing deserves to rank for them.
3. Reach a self-funding state. A point where organic sales carry the product and advertising is profitable, or close to it. That is the first turn of the brand’s own Amazon flywheel.

A launch is a conversion exercise first and a traffic exercise second. Brands that flip that order pay for it.

Before you list: product, margin and stock

Choose the product with data. Reviews, returns comments and customer questions, on your products and your competitors’, are the cheapest product research there is. Unscented versions, refill packs and travel sizes often come straight out of that reading.

Build in enough margin to launch. My own rule of thumb for a new brand is a landed cost of no more than 20–25% of the selling price. Above that, every launch cost comes out of a thin margin. Work out your break-even ACoS before you write a line of copy, using the method in our break-even ACoS guide, and check the fees with our FBA calculator for the UK.

Check quality and compliance before you order, not after. Inspect production stock, not just the sample, and make sure you can show the product meets the safety rules that apply to it. A batch that leaks or breaks will collect the reviews that sink the launch.

Make the listing ready to convert. That means a 75-character title, item highlights, compliant bullets and a main image that works at thumbnail size, all covered in our listing optimisation guide.

Plan stock and capacity. Amazon suggests holding enough FBA inventory to cover 30 to 60 days of expected sales, and treats anything over 90 days of supply as excess¹³. New Professional accounts active for less than 39 weeks have no FBA capacity limits¹¹, and products listed on FBA for the first time qualify for capacity relief for their first 90 days, so you can build initial stock even if your account is at its limit¹². Box-level inventory placement, which sends your boxes to several fulfilment centres from one shipment plan, comes at no additional cost in the UK¹⁴. Plan the first reorder before you launch. Our guide on how to send products to Amazon FBA in the UK walks through the shipment itself.

The UK launch tools Amazon offers in 2026

Vine. You need a Brand Representative or Reseller role in a brand enrolled in Brand Registry, an FBA offer with stock, and fewer than 30 published reviews; adult and digital products are excluded². Each ASIN can be enrolled only once in its lifetime, you can have up to 200 active enrolments, and you are only charged if at least one Vine review arrives within 90 days¹². Two details catch people out. FBA and referral fees still apply to Vine orders¹. And Vine units count in Units Ordered and Ordered Product Sales in your Business Reports, so your launch sales figures will look better than your bank balance².

Pre-launch Vine is the most useful change for launches. Set a product site launch date in the future, enrol, and get stock into the fulfilment network; Amazon recommends at least three weeks before launch. Reviews stay hidden until launch day, and the 90-day enrolment starts when the stock is received and buyable². Our guide to Amazon Vine in the UK covers enrolment and when it pays back.

New Seller Incentives. To qualify for the brand benefits you must be on the Professional plan, complete Brand Registry before or within six months of listing your first product, and be the first brand owner. For sellers whose first product went live on or after 26 March 2026, the New Brand Bonus works as a referral-fee discount of 10% on the first £40,000 of eligible branded sales and 5% on the next £760,000, for up to a year³. The advertising credit matches what you spend on Sponsored Products in your first 30 days, in tiers of £37, £150 and £750, if you launch your first campaign within 90 days of listing³.

New Selection Programme (2026). This replaced the old FBA New Selection programme, which ended on 30 July 2026⁵. It covers branded parent ASINs that no seller has shipped to FBA in the past 12 months, requires an IPI score of 300 or more if you have one, and adds a £60 Vine credit (for a 3–10 unit enrolment) and £40 of voucher credit within 60 days of listing, plus free storage, returns processing and liquidation on the first 200 units for 120 days. Sellers who were enrolled in the old programme must confirm enrolment by 31 October 2026 to keep the benefits on new products⁴. Where it overlaps with New Seller Incentives, the incentive credits are used first⁴.

Price promotions. Prime exclusive discounts must be at least 5% below the current price, the 30-day low and the non-Prime price, and a savings comparison only shows with a validated reference price⁷. A product that has just launched has little price history, so we usually reach for a voucher first.

Reviews before PPC, or PPC from day one?

Our older blog posts gave two answers. One said wait for about ten reviews before switching on advertising; a later one said launch with heavy Sponsored Products spend from day one. Both had a point, and the honest answer is that the tools have changed enough to remove most of the conflict.

The arithmetic explains why reviews matter so much:

At 4% conversion, which is plausible for a product with no reviews, that click gives an ACoS of 84%. At 8% it is 42%. The bid is the same; the reviews and the listing made the difference. Advertising hard with no reviews buys sales at roughly twice the price.

But waiting has a cost too. A product with no sales has nothing to rank on, and in our experience organic sales alone can take months to produce ten reviews. So our current practice is:

1. Enrol in pre-launch Vine so that reviews are visible from launch day².
2. Start Sponsored Products on day one, narrow. A modest daily budget on exact-match terms that describe the product precisely, found with the methods in our Amazon keyword research guide, plus an automatic campaign to find search terms. Our PPC strategy guide covers the structure.
3. Scale with conversion, not the calendar. Increase budget when unit session percentage improves and reviews arrive. If conversion stalls, fix the listing or the offer before adding spend.

The review rules

Amazon’s policy is short to summarise: you may not post reviews of your own or a competitor’s product, or have family or staff do so; offer anyone money, discounts, free products or refunds in exchange for a review; ask for positive reviews only; or divert unhappy customers away from reviewing. The penalties include losing your selling privileges, losing all the product’s reviews, permanent delisting and legal action⁹. Vine is the exception Amazon runs itself, and even then you may not contact Vine reviewers about their reviews².

UK law now backs this up. Since April 2025, fake reviews and paid-for reviews that are not clearly marked as incentivised have been banned practices under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024¹⁰. One of our older posts described a launch built on micro-influencer purchases with commission codes; we no longer recommend anything that ties a creator’s payment or free product to an Amazon review. Use creators for content and traffic, and let reviews come through Vine and ordinary customers. Our guide to how to get reviews on Amazon sets out the four ways Amazon allows.

The 90-day plan

Four to six weeks before launch. Brand Registry complete. Listing, images and A+ content final. Price set with room for a voucher. Stock booked into FBA with a first reorder date. Pre-launch Vine enrolment in place with stock arriving at least three weeks before launch day. Check New Seller Incentives and New Selection eligibility.

Days 1–30: prove conversion. Narrow Sponsored Products on exact-match terms plus one automatic campaign. Hold the price steady. Read the search term report weekly and move converting searches into exact match. Expect ACoS well above break-even; that is the investment.

Days 31–60: widen. Add phrase and broad match on proven terms and, once brand-registered, Sponsored Brands. Run a voucher if conversion needs a nudge. Start sending your own email list or social audience to the listing now that it converts.

Days 61–90: move towards profit. Bring bids down towards break-even on terms that rank organically. Cut search terms that spend without converting. Decide whether the product has earned a permanent budget, and if not, why not.

A launch budget built from your margin

Our older launch post quoted £8,000–£25,000 for a competitive UK launch over 90 days. We can’t show where that range came from, so we have dropped it. A useful launch budget comes from your own numbers.

Add the other launch costs:

• Vine: 30 units, a £140 fee¹ plus about £318 of stock and fulfilment (£10.60 a unit, before any referral fee shown against Vine orders), so £458. A new brand’s £160 Vine credit would cover the fee³.
• Vouchers: a £3 voucher on 200 units costs about £2.50 of ex-VAT margin each, plus £2 and 0.75% of voucher sales in fees⁶: £535.
• Content: photography and A+ design, £1,500 (illustrative).

That makes a launch investment of £3,295. Over the same 90 days, the 300 organic sales the plan assumes earn £1,656 of margin, so the net cost is about £1,640. If the product then settles at 10 units a day with a TACoS of 10%, it makes about £1,030 a month after advertising (£6,249 × (26.5% − 10%)), and the launch has paid for itself in under two months of normal trading.

Dearer clicks, lower conversion or five variations can multiply the answer, which is the point of doing the sum. Decide before you start the most you will invest, the ACoS you expect each month and the date you will review it.

Why launches fail when everything looks right

Two launches we were asked to look at had the basics in place: a decent listing, running campaigns, A+ content planned. Neither was working.

A stationery brand’s advertising cost about as much as it brought in. The listing was fine. The offer was not: the same price as every competitor, no reviews and nothing that made it different. The fix was a reason to choose it, through bundles, multipacks for business buyers and a launch voucher, not better ads.

A supplements brand had hired a capable PPC agency and was still losing money on every ad sale. The targeting was sound. The rating sat well below the category average and the product had far fewer reviews than its rivals. No bid strategy outruns a weak rating. The fix was to slow ad spend, remove the reviews that broke Amazon’s guidelines, and rebuild trust before scaling.

The mistakes we see most often:

1. Advertising a listing that isn’t ready. A weak main image or vague title makes every click dearer.
2. Going broad on day one. Hundreds of broad-match keywords with no conversion data spend fast and teach you little.
3. Asking friends and family for reviews. It breaks Amazon’s policy⁹ and puts the account at risk before the product has a chance.
4. Running out of stock in the launch window.
5. Launching too many products at once. Get one product to profit, then repeat what worked.

How to tell if the launch worked

At day 90, look at four numbers: unit session percentage, organic share of sales, TACoS and its direction, and profit after advertising. A launch that worked shows conversion up, organic share rising and TACoS falling towards a level the margin can carry. If the product still only sells when you pay for every sale, the launch has told you something about the product, the price or the category, and that is worth knowing before you order more stock.