If there’s one thing we know without a doubt about Amazon Prime Day, it’s this:
There’s not a single Amazon seller that can afford to miss out.
If you haven’t started to prepare for this year’s event, now’s the time. Successful Prime Day sales depend on a number of critical variables that need to be prepped well in advance of the big day in July.
We covered a lot of ground in our recent webinar. If you weren’t able to attend, here are the highlights…
Get Ready: Prepare Content for Prime Day Marketing
First things first: If you want people to find your products on Prime Day, you’re going to need an exceptional advertising strategy. And for your ads to stand out, optimised product content is essential.
While having quality content is always the first step to e-commerce success, it becomes especially critical during high-traffic events like Amazon Prime Day. So as soon as you’ve decided which products you’ll be offering, start to evaluate those listings for improvements. Specifically, you’ll need to:
- Ensure titles accurately represent your products while still meeting the character minimums and maximums Amazon has set for both desktop and mobile views.
- Have at least three images per listing and offer zoom functionality wherever possible.
- Make sure feature bullets vary by item and are descriptive without being too wordy.
Once you’ve optimised your product content, you’ll need to quickly determine which advertising formats you’d like to pursue. Depending on your business model, you might want to prioritise:
- Lightning Deals. These highly popular flash sales are one of the best ways to reach consumers on Prime Day.
- Sponsored Products. These keyword-targeted ads can be used to promote individual listings, and will appear in both search results and product display pages throughout Prime Day.
- Sponsored Brands. Sellers with brand-registered items can leverage these headline-style ads to guide Prime Day shoppers to your store page or individual product pages.
Other solid Amazon Advertising options include Product Display Ads, Buy One Get One, Amazon Coupons and volume pricing.
Get set: Prepare Products and Pricing for Prime Day Selling
Next, you’ll need to ensure all items remain live and listed on the Amazon platform and are free of critical issues. Any problems you fail to surface and address today — product or customer complaints, return or refund requests, late shipments and more — can impact your ability to succeed come Prime Day.
If you’re not currently checking your Amazon health metrics on a regular basis, consider this your reminder to start doing so weekly. And be proactive about contacting Amazon or ChannelAdvisor support to address any inactive items or suppressions.
And then there’s one of the most crucial steps all sellers need to take:
Optimising pricing.
Prime Day is all about deals and discounts. So if you want to sell well, having an effective pricing strategy in place is going to be critical. And for that, you need a strong repricer.
With the ChannelAdvisor Amazon Repricer, for example, pricing can be adjusted based on what competitors are doing in as little as ten minutes. This will give you a big advantage over sellers who are using slower services, or who aren’t using repricers at all. Just be sure you’re using a tool that not only adjusts prices up and down, but also has safeguards in place to help ensure you’ll win the Buy Box at the highest price possible.
Go: Prepare Delivery for Prime Day Fulfilling
Whether you’ll be fulfilling Prime Day orders through Amazon or plan to use Seller-Fulfilled Prime, it’s essential to remain in good standing. It goes without saying that short handling times and fast deliveries will ultimately dictate your Prime Day outcomes.
While many sellers opt to meet Amazon’s strict delivery requirements by sticking to wholesale or leveraging Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA), those certainly aren’t your only options.
There are plenty of other Prime Day tactics, but these are some of the most important to start addressing right now. You’ll need to create a holistic, team-wide strategy that encompasses a full range of marketing, selling and fulfilling activities.
Throughout your planning, be sure you don’t accidentally neglect other marketplaces. EBay, Otto, Zalando and others all recognise July as a competitive time for e-commerce at large, so be sure to set aside inventory for your marketplaces outside of Amazon.
Get even more tips in the on-demand webinar.
Looking for more ideas you can use to increase your chances for Prime Day success? You can get additional tips and recommendations in the on-demand webinar, Get Prime Day Ready: Make the Most of Amazon’s Biggest Shopping Day. Watch this 20-minute webinar for:
- A week-by-week timeline of activities to follow
- Best practices for pricing, customer feedback, logistics and more
- Tips for new sellers
And don’t forget to subscribe to the ChannelAdvisor blog to be updated as new Prime Day prep resources are ready.
