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You may have seen tags saying that certain products are “add-on items” but don’t know what that means.
If you shop on Amazon regularly, it can be a good idea to learn what different tags for products mean. This will help streamline your shopping experience.
Here is how you can find Add-Ons items on Amazon easily.
Quick Summary of This Guide
In this post, we will expand upon:
- What add-on items are
- How they are used
- How you can find them on Amazon
Let’s get into it.
What is an Add-On Item on Amazon?
Add-on items are a fairly recent addition to the platform, being introduced back in 2019.
Add-on items on Amazon are small items that cannot be shipped by themselves to you due to cost-prohibitive reasons.
Hence, you have to add other items to your order with the add-on items in order to bring your checkout total to the minimum purchase threshold ($25).
Add-on items typically include products such as:
- Office supplies
- Hygiene products
- Snacks
- Accessories for electronics
And much more.
In the past, Amazon realized that when such small items were ordered, they would have to pay more in shipping costs than the sum they would actually receive for the item.
Hence, they introduced the add-on program to fix this. As you can probably imagine, the introduction of add-on items did not go over too well with the Amazon community including both buyers as well as sellers.
One of the more prevalent problems when it comes to add-on items on Amazon is the fact that there’s no clear way to search for them.
If you’d like to exclusively browse through a list of add-on items, Amazon has not provided any straightforward way to do so.
That being said, there is a way through which you can look for add-on items on Amazon to add to your cart.
How to Find Add-On Items Through Amazon Search?
As of now, there’s no filter option in Amazon’s search bar that lets you exclusively search from a list of add-on items.
You can game the system in a crude way, however, to display only add-on items.
The way you can do this is by searching for the term “add-on item” or “add-on items” in the search bar.
Sadly, this is currently the only way you can get access to a (somewhat) exclusive list of add-on items.
Even this search is not the best and you may have to do some manual filtering as non-add-on items can sometimes show up here regardless.
Furthermore, this technique does not work for specific add-on items.
For example, if you search for “pencil add-on item”, your search results will not be appropriately filtered.
We don’t know if Amazon is currently working on adding a filter for add-on items to their search bar or if they don’t plan to add it at all.
How to Identify Add-on Items on Amazon?
Any time you come across an item that has the add-on product label on it, you can be sure it’s an add-on item.
The add-on product label looks like this:
Quick TIp for Non-Prime members: Add some add-on items to your shopping cart and then “Save them for later”.
This is a great way to keep them on hand at a later stage when you have to reach a minimum purchase threshold for some future order.
Some Things to Note
When placing add-on items onto your cart, there are some things you should be aware of regarding what you can and can’t do.
These are:
- If your shopping cart contains both regular items as well as add-on items but the value is less than $25, then you won’t be able to check out your add-on items. They will be saved for later until you have a future order that values more than $25.
- If you have a shopping cart that consists of only add-on items but the value is less than $25, then you won’t be presented with a checkout button. You’ll have to add more items until the value reaches $25 or more.
- Many add-on items are also part of the Subscribe & Save program on Amazon. If you opt for a Subscribe & Save offer on an add-on item, then the $25 minimum threshold will not apply for the automatic deliveries of that item.
- If your order’s value is more than $25, it doesn’t matter if it’s a mix of regular items and add-on items or just add-on items, you will be able to order it successfully with Prime shipping benefits.
Why do Amazon Add-On Items Disappear So Quickly?
You can always count on certain add-on items to always be available for you to add to your order to get free shipping.
That being said, other add-ons tend to disappear very quickly after they become available on the platform.
Why is that?
Well, in order to understand why this happens, you need to understand what having add-on items means for sellers on the platform.
Sellers aren’t the ones who classify their items as add-on items, this is done by Amazon’s own criteria and algorithm.
While the criteria are not publicly available, it most likely has a lot to do with the weight and the price of the item.
Sellers aren’t even notified when their items are classified as add-on items.
Obviously, having their items classified as add-ons is not desirable for sellers as this will mean many of their regular customers may stop ordering from them and look towards other online retailers.
So, when sellers find out that this has happened, they attempt to fix this by either raising the price of their items or selling them in multi-pack form.
Once the prices of these items increase, Amazon ceases to classify them as add-on items, and thus, they become regular items.
Wrapping Things Up…
We hope we were able to shed some light on the Add-on program by Amazon and what Amazon add-on items are.
The addition of add-on items to mitigate shipping costs by Amazon was definitely a controversial move but we’ll have to wait and see what the platform does to make things better.
What do you think of Amazon add-on items? Let us know in the comments below.
