Harpy Glossary

MFP (Minimum Featured Price)

Amazon & D2C glossary · Harpy Media

MFP (Minimum Featured Price) is the lowest price at which your product has actually won the Featured Offer over a defined trailing window. It is a historical record, not a policy — a price floor created by your own past deals, dips, and discounts.

What is MFP?

And it has teeth, because Amazon’s promotional systems read it when you apply for deals. Deal eligibility is typically calculated from that historical low: the discount is assessed against the minimum featured price, not against your current price. Every casual price drop writes a new line into that record — and future promotions must respect it.

Why MFP dictates promotional capacity

The mechanism is simple and unforgiving. Deals require a meaningful discount from the reference price, and the reference price is informed by the lowest recent featured price. If your floor is $20 because of one slow weekend in a quiet month, then a 20%-off deal is calculated from $20 — and must price at $16, not at the $22 your margins were built for.

The window extends for major events: while the reference commonly looks back over the trailing period measured in weeks, tier-one events can be evaluated against a longer window heading towards the full quarter, so a poorly timed dip can constrain your deal pricing through an entire peak season. Price discipline in the quiet weeks is what buys promotional room in the loud ones.

Managing your price floor deliberately

Treat every price change as a decision with a promotional consequence. A flash drop to clear stock looks harmless in isolation — then the next deal application calculates from it, and the discount that follows is larger than intended. Before lowering the visible price, ask whether a coupon or promotion would achieve the same objective without resetting the historical floor.

And plan the floor forwards, not backwards. Decide the lowest price you can profitably sustain for the coming season, keep routine trading comfortably above it, and spend down towards it only with intent — when the volume, ranking, or clearance objective justifies the promotional room it will cost later. The brands that keep peak-season flexibility are the ones that protected it in October.

MFP = min(P(featured)(t))The minimum featured price recorded over a trailing window — commonly around 30 days for ordinary pricing review, extending further back for major tier-one promotional events.

In practice

A brand holds a water bottle at $24.99 and, during a slow October weekend, drops the price to $19.99 for two days to clear some stock. That becomes the historical low. A month later, their Prime Exclusive Discount application is assessed against $19.99 — and the required 20% off that reference puts the deal price at $15.99. Because they understood the mechanism, they had modelled margins at the lower tier in advance: the deal runs, and it stays profitable.

⚠️ Watch out. Weeks before Black Friday, a seller runs a heavy 40% retail discount to push organic rank, inadvertently dropping their baseline floor to $12. When they try to schedule the flagship holiday deal, Amazon’s system demands a further 20% off the new baseline — $9.60, below what fixed fulfilment fees can support. The seller cannot run the most important promotion of the year at the maths available, and forfeits peak-season volume over one unplanned discount.

💡 Harpy tip. Map your intended floor across the full promotional calendar before the season starts. Keep routine pricing above it, use coupons or non-price levers for mid-quarter clearance where possible, and when you do reset the floor, do it once, deliberately, with the later deal pricing already modelled.

How Harpy Media helps

Promotional calendar planning is part of how we run brands through peak seasons: floors modelled in advance, price changes checked against deal requirements, and clearance tactics chosen so they do not quietly cost the deal pricing that matters most.

MFP FAQ

What is the difference between MFP and MAP?

MFP is arithmetic — Amazon’s record of your lowest recent featured price, which sets deal discount calculations. MAP is commercial policy — the minimum price your brand permits retailers to advertise. One is what happened; the other is what is allowed.

How far back does the minimum featured price go?

Commonly around a trailing 30-day window for standard assessment, extending to roughly 90 days ahead of major tier-one events. The exact evaluation periods can shift, which is why the safe rule is to treat any visible dip as potentially live for the season.

Do coupons and promotions affect MFP?

The metric tracks featured price events. Visible price reductions that win the Featured Offer are what write the record; coupon mechanics and internal discounts behave differently. The practical discipline is the same either way: do not reset your visible floor without modelling the promotional consequence.

Want these numbers watched for you, every week?

Book Free Consultation