Amazon Black Friday deal deadline Oct 20: a video work-back calendar

Amazon's Holiday 2026 page gives **October 20** as the last day to submit deals for Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday (the submission window runs July 8 to October 20). If you want a sale video to be part of that deal, plan on having the creative locked well before then, because every price change after approval means a re-render.

This post is a calendar for the video side only. The dates in the first table are Amazon's. The internal freeze dates in the second table are suggestions, not Amazon rules.

What Amazon's page says (read 2026-10-05)

The page lists deal submission deadlines by event and two early-submission discount dates. It also says there are no new eligibility requirements this year. Check the page itself for which deal types each date applies to before you commit.

A work-back calendar for the sale clip

Count back from the submission date, not from Black Friday itself. The clip is usually the last asset to settle, because it carries the price and the end date.

Preflight every cut with a plan call

Timeline 1.0 has an unbilled plan endpoint. It returns duration_seconds, segment_count, billable_minutes and estimated_cost_usd_micros without creating a job or downloading media. The public render rate is $0.10 per started output minute, so the plan is mostly a way to catch a bad slot list early. A plan cannot predict short-source pad or loop warnings, so still review the render.

The sketch below plans a 15-second cut of one clip and one still. Stills are static holds, so do not rely on motion from the still.

import json, os, urllib.request

body = {
    "audio": {"mode": "silence", "duration_seconds": 15},
    "video": [
        {"source_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/hero.mp4", "start": 0, "duration": 8},
        {"source_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/offer.png", "start": 8, "duration": 7,
         "transition": {"type": "fade", "duration": 0.25}},
    ],
}
req = urllib.request.Request(
    "https://api.sume.com/v1/timeline-1.0/plan", json.dumps(body).encode(),
    {"Authorization": "Bearer " + os.environ["SUME_API_KEY"], "Content-Type": "application/json"})
plan = json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(req))
print(plan["duration_seconds"], plan["segment_count"], plan["estimated_cost_usd_micros"])

Burn the price last

Keep the price card out of the render and add it as authored cues on the finished MP4. Video captions takes cues with text, start and end, and burns them without speech-to-text. A caption job is $0.20 for a video up to 60 seconds, so a late price change costs one job per cut rather than a new edit.

When this calendar is the wrong tool

If your deal is not going through the Amazon submission flow (for example a store-only sale), none of these dates apply. Amazon's page is a seller forum post, so confirm the dates in Seller Central before you rely on them. The calendar also says nothing about whether a video is accepted in any placement.