How To Prepare for Amazon Prime Day
Essentially “Christmas in July”, Prime Day is Amazon’s annual 30-hour shopping extravaganza featuring exclusive deals for Amazon Prime shoppers.
Scheduled to begin at noon on Monday, July 16th until midnight on Tuesday, July 17th, Amazon has been sparing no efforts to vigorously drum-up hype for their highly anticipated 4th annual Prime Day. Ensuring that current shoppers and new Prime members alike will be eagerly waiting to purchase discounted product.
Last year tens of millions of Prime customers made purchases on Prime Day, an increase of over 50% from the previous year. This year Amazon estimates traffic to their site to surpass Black Friday as the BIGGEST shopping holiday of the year.
Benefits for Sellers and Vendors
The largest opportunity for sellers is undoubtedly the increase in traffic. Not only will there be more visitors to the platform; these people will be in shopping-mode versus people who regularly browse the site with little intent to make a purchase. This is a huge benefit as it gives seller exposure to potentially thousands of new customers.
The bottom line: what does this mean for sales?
There is a large opportunity to increase exposure and draw eager shoppers to your listings – in short, grow sales. Grow they do, sellers last year saw an average of 60% increase in sales on Prime Day alone across varying product categories and price points. In 2017, the “Home” Category was one of the most shopped categories with furniture sales growing 200% from the previous year and surprising success in higher price point items as shoppers were eagerly snatching up popular home furnishings.
It doesn’t stop there.
The effect of Prime Day can have a lasting impact on your catalog known as the “Halo Effect”. Amazon uses algorithms to rate your products and determine their relevancy in comparison to competing products. This means that producing strong sales during Prime Day can in essence “teach” Amazon that your product is satisfying shoppers. This helps boost organic ranking and can even earn the coveted “Amazon’s Choice” or Best Seller Badge.
How to Prepare?
Although the deadline for Lightning Deals ended on May 18, not all hope is lost; there are still a few marketing levers sellers can pull to benefit from Prime Day.
Optimize your Listings
Create a high impact listing by making sure your images are high quality, optimize copy with relevant keywords, and make sure that you have as many positive reviews as possible. If available, make sure that your products have Enhanced Brand Content and Videos to further improve your listing quality. These factors greatly affect your listing’s ability to convert as they are the only pieces of information that shoppers can use to evaluate your product.
Increase Sponsored Product Ad Efforts
High traffic shopping events cause competition to become more aggressive, pushing up Sponsored Product Ad bids. Keeping bids stagnant during this time will cause your products to lose visibility as competitor’s outbid you. This decline in sessions limits your ability to produce sales. Increasing bids on your best-converting keywords can be the difference between accelerating sales velocity and falling flat.
If available, make sure to create Headline Search Ads with top converting keywords and link to your store to increase exposure to the rest of your catalog.
Incentivizing Promotions
Prime Day shoppers are hunting for great deals. Offering multi-unit promotions, sale prices, or coupons helps incentivize bargain shoppers and increase cart sizes. Failing to provide any kind of promotional discount tends to deter some shoppers as they focus on finding time sensitive markdowns on Prime Day.
Inventory Management
Make sure to have enough quantity available to fulfill the demand for your best-selling products, there is nothing worse than running out of stock and losing out on sales. Properly analyzing sales history and projected Prime Day velocity will allow you to send in enough FBA stock without overstocking and ending up with excess storage fees or a low Inventory Performance Index score.
Are you ready for Prime Day?
Prime Day is NOT a panacea; only sellers who have properly prepared reap the benefits. After all, what benefit is there to having an influx of traffic on the Amazon platform if you have products that are not ranking in search, have no ads, poor quality listings, and no incentivizing prices or promotions?
Winning on Amazon
What is Amazon’s number 1 priority? Keeping shoppers happy and offering the best possible shopping experience at the lowest prices. If you want to sell on their marketplace you must play by their rules; the best way to take full advantage of the benefits of the fastest growing marketplace is by working with an experienced partner. No guessing or trial and error; rely on an Amazon specific, data-based, strategy and tried-and-true best practices that turn shoppers into customers.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Channel Key can help you improve your presence on Amazon click here and we’ll be glad to provide you with a free Marketplace Analysis.
