Amazon Prime Day is an annual shopping holiday that will take place on July 15th and 16th. Even though the deals are exclusive to Amazon Prime subscribers, most well-prepared Amazon sellers can expect to at least double their sales over the 48 hour period.
This article will help you prepare for Amazon Prime Day as a merchant. However, all the tips are just as useful for other major holidays. So, even if you’re not planning to participate, the tips will come in handy multiple times every year.
Before we start, it’s important to note the benefits of participating in Amazon Prime Day. As a seller, you can benefit through immediate profit or Amazon seller reputation. You can gain high amounts of profit for the short-term. As well as hit a lot of sales to increase your reputation/ratings. Meaning, your products will rank higher in searches. This, obviously, is a long-term benefit.
Optimize your listings
Ideally, your listings should be optimized at all times. But in reality, that’s not always the case. Therefore, optimizing your listings for Amazon Prime Day is a top priority. That includes the title, image and the price.
- Image. Make sure your images are high quality and attractive. If there’s still time before the big day, test different images and see how they work. If there’s not enough time – use your friends as a focus group to pick the best images. Also, consider checking competitor images. Try to figure out what’s common between the best performing listings. If you’re going to snap new pictures for your products, keep in mind – nothing matters as much as the lighting. If there’s one thing you can invest into, let it be the lighting. The camera itself doesn’t matter nearly as much.
- Title. Titles have the most weight when it comes to search result rankings. Just like with the pictures, it’s advised to test several titles before Amazon Prime Day. Imagine yourself as the buyer and write down the words you’d use to look for your product. Ensure your title contains the most important ones.
- Price. Similar to images and titles, you’re advised to experiment a little. However, competitors play a bigger role here. It’s critical to understand that changing the price does not always affect sales equally. This concept is called price elasticity. The better you understand price elasticity, the quicker you’ll be at finding the optimal prices for your products. However, economic theory has been wrong before – experiment with your prices nevertheless.
- Descriptions. Your descriptions should match the product. This means they’re not always supposed to be technical. Far from that. Creative copy can do much more than convince customers who are on the fence. Even though creative writing is a topic of its own, we’ll share a technique that can be very helpful. First of all, you need to separate two stages: coming up with ideas and filtering them. Most writing hits the trash bin because people tend to filter as they write. Which is a colossal mistake. Instead, set a timer for, say, 5 minutes. Now, think about your product and put down any idea that pops into your head. No matter how vague, mundane or crazy it is. Think of it as a race, go through as many as you can. Once the timer runs out – look into each idea. Start filtering. Try your best to make each idea useful. You’ll be surprised where the best ones emerge from.
Lightning deals on Amazon Prime Day
Lightning deals are a huge topic on Amazon Prime Day. The slots are so tight you have to book them 3-4 months prior. However, if you haven’t – don’t worry. But if you’re considering to do so for another occasion, you should follow one rule.
Normally, setting up a Lightning deal costs around $150, on Amazon Prime Day, the price can vary between $300 and $750. So, you’ll have to do some math to work out whether it’s worth it.
Generally, you want to multiply your sales by 3 and see if the profit margin covers the Lightning deal cost. If it does – you might want to give it a shot. However, you have to be confident in your product and optimize it thoroughly even before you schedule the Lightning deal.
We don’t recommend Lightning deals to new sellers. To really get a bang out of your buck, you better have some reputation built up on your account beforehand.
Regular listings
Statistically, Amazon Private Label products perform better than regular ones during such occasions as Amazon Prime Day. If you’re selling products that are generic and similar to competitor’s, it might be a good idea to set up your Amazon brand. As an added bonus, it certainly helps winning the Buy Box.
Anyways, your regular listings will have heightened traffic either way during Amazon Prime Day. You can expect around twice as much sales. However, if you’ve come prepared your sales can even go up to four times as much. Such results, indeed, require a lot of work. Optimizing your listings meticulously, as well as the product descriptions is just the beginning.
Don’t forget – all this extra demand calls for extra inventory on hand. Be sure to stack up on goods you forecast to sell well. Be aware, that such holidays are often littered with impulsive purchases. Meaning, it might be a good time to test out a silly product you’ve had your sights on.
Despite how seriously you take your business, keep in mind that the greatest breakthroughs happen when there’s fun involved. After all, that’s when our mind is the most open to suggestions and new ideas.
PPC on Amazon Prime Day and other advertising
A great way to prepare for Amazon Prime Day is to set up a new Amazon Pay-per-click ad campaign. Much like every other part of this, you’ll want to tinker around with it before the much awaited day. Optimizing your Amazon PPC is almost as critical as the listings.
On Amazon Prime Day, PPC prices normally go down. That happens because the clicks get used up and the competition gets thinner. Meaning, you can go big on advertising with smaller costs. Which you should do. Monitor PPC costs the whole 48-hour period. This is the advertising method you’ll want to focus on exclusively in that timeframe.
If you’re creative, realize that it’s an asset. Use it to your advantage. This can dramatically contribute to the lasting success of your business. For example, if you’ve got fun product descriptions – maybe you can create a video about those. However, try to be customer-oriented, rather than peer-oriented. Which means appeal to the general public rather than making a guide for Amazon sellers. Unless, of course, you’ve got something to offer for them, as well.
Showing the face behind the products is smart. Giving your account an identity has a comparable effect to creating a product brand. It makes customers trust you more. Meaning, even video blogs of you doing daily Amazon tasks like packing and shipping goods can really work out in your favor. Even though this is a popular format, and barely anyone is original or offers any value – it’s not a good enough reason to shy from it. All you have to do for it to be effective is to show the human behind the Amazon seller account. It’s as simple (or complicated) as it sounds.
Whether you go the more traditional route or work on creative ways to become a better merchant, the more time and effort you’ll put into it – the better the results will be. Much like everything in life, don’t expect things to come out great from the very beginning. If your schedule is already tight, you’re probably not using inventory management software. If you’d like to have much more time on your hands, be sure to read that part of this article.
Price
We’ve partially covered price already. However, there’s something else you should consider. In the introduction of the article we’ve mentioned the short- and long-term benefits of participating in Amazon Prime Day. They were profit (short-term) and Amazon seller ratings (long-term).
When going into major holidays like Amazon Prime Day, one of the most important things to work out, if you haven’t already, are your break-even points. Just to clarify, it’s a product price that covers all the expenses you’ve experienced. Including costs like supplier cost, Amazon fees, storage and shipping.
Since you’ll be closely monitoring the prices of competitor products during Amazon Prime Day and adapting to the market (changing your prices as well), you absolutely need to know your break-even points. Consider it a price that you shouldn’t go below. However, selling products at the break-even point can be beneficial, even though you’re not making immediate profit off of it.
This goes back to the aforementioned long-term benefit – Amazon seller rating. The more you sell, the more reputable your account becomes. Which is nothing to scoff at. The heigtened sales period can have a really big impact for the next few weeks following the holiday.
Normally, the sales continue to go through at a higher volume after such occasions. After a couple of weeks they go back to normal. However, the Amazon algorithms value merchants who have huge sales spikes and push these sellers forward. Therefore, selling at the break-even point to emphasize the sales spike can bring profit indirectly.
If you’re looking to profit in the short-term, you’ll have to experiment with the prices and analyze your sales reports. What you’ll be looking for is the optimal point between sales volume and profit margin. In these graphs, there are often break points. Ideally, you should position your products right after or before those breakpoints. Of course, they can change and often rely on competitor prices. So, put some time into optimizing prices for products that underperform.
Managing time
All the tasks we’ve went through require a lot of time. Even though this may seem overwhelming, the rewards are far greater than just good Amazon Prime Day results. Ideally, you should be doing all these things perpetually. However, most merchants fail to find the time in their workdays to make everything happen.
The common culprit for eating up seller’s time is the inventory management. A lot of merchants rely on Excel spreadsheets and other rather primitive means of keeping up with their business. Such methods are vulnerable to human error, not to mention the time and cost inefficiencies.
We recommend adopting software for the purpose of inventory management. Namely, Multiorders. This powerful set of tools and features will help you zip through tasks that would otherwise take you hours each day. It basically automates every task you do to maintain your business. Of course, except for the physical part of handling, packing and shipping goods. But there are solutions that can automate this process as well, but we’ll get to it in a moment. First, let’s quickly run through the benefits of using Multiorders:
- Stock control. Restock products and track sales within a single dashboard. You can combine multiple sales channels into it, as well. Meaning, if you’re also selling on eBay or any other platform – it’ll provide you with a unified solution.
- Order management. Check, manage and track order status with just a couple of clicks.
- Shipping. Connect several shipping carriers to reduce shipping costs. Generate shipping labels and set up tracking in mere moments.
- Suppliers. Assign suppliers to products. Set a buy price to see and track profit margins. This is incredibly convenient for all the tips around breaking even. As well as tracking profitability.
- Purchase orders. Send purchase orders to suppliers with just a few clicks. Automatically update inventory upon receiving the goods.
- Payment. You can connect Stripe to Multiorders for your local or phone orders.
- Shipping labels. Print shipping labels with one click. Use shipping presets and bulk shipping options.
- Reports. This one is really great. This feature will generate custom sales and inventory reports for selected timeframes. You can apply various filters, such as the sales channel.
- Relationships. Integrate your MailChimp or Omnisend into Multiorders. Convenient for creating marketing newsletters for specific sales channels.
- USPS Premium discounts. All Multiorders users get the best shipping rates with USPS Commercial Plus pricing.
- Team roles. Create and manage sub-accounts for your employees. You can assign them custom rights. You can also assign orders to specific team members to further optimize the workflow.
Amazon FBA for Prime Day
As we’ve mentioned before, you can automate the physical tasks such as receiving, handling, storing, packing and shipping goods. The service is called Amazon FBA and it integrates seamlessly into Multiorders. 66% of Amazon’s top 10 000 sellers use it.
If you enroll in the FBA program, you can automate order fulfillment by taking advantage of Amazon’s advanced shipping and fulfillment services and earn more sales from Amazon’s coveted Prime customers. – Gennifer Carragher
We’re not going into much further detail about this service, but if you’re looking to automate your business to the brim, this is certainly something you should look into. Keep in mind, that Amazon can also fulfill orders from other sales channels. Meaning, you can also use their services to handle your eBay listings. Or any other marketplace, for that matter.
Conclusion
Amazon Prime Day or not, the work you’ll put in will pay off. Of course, if you do this in time for major sales events like Amazon Prime Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday or some traditional holidays you’ll feel a bigger immediate impact.
However, maintaining an online business is not easy. Don’t make it harder for yourself by not using shortcuts like Multiorders. For the very least, consider joining for the free trial. You’ll be able to use all of the features, with no limitations for up to two weeks.
By the end of it, we’re certain you’ll want to stick around. If you’re concerned about an extra monthly cost – be assured that our pricing is unmatched by competition. If you’d like to compare features as well as prices with other providers, visit GoodFirms.co. They have a splendid selection.
