Amazon Prime Day is back just in time for the holiday season. This year’s event will take place on October 13-14, featuring incredible savings and deep discounts on more than one million deals across every category. Despite being exclusive to Prime shoppers, Amazon Prime Day is the second largest shopping event for Amazon sellers after Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
The company stated in its announcement that this year, supporting small businesses is more important than ever, and that they are designing Prime Day to support them with their biggest small business promotion ever. Amazon is now offering Prime members a $10 credit to use on Prime Day when members spend $10 on items sold by select small businesses in their store.
It is still not late to get ready for the Prime Day next week. Look at last year’s sales stats, for your business and the industry, to determine your top products to concentrate on, your niche segments to push and the marketing channels you historically and currently have the best results from.
Here are the top 7 ways to do just that!
1. Optimize Your Product Listings
Before the busy prime day and shopping season (and peak marketing) begin, you should look at your platform content. This includes ensuring your product listings are optimized and edited for the prime day. Not only do you want to review your product descriptions to make sure they are mistake-free. Here’s a list of product listing elements to review and revise on-site and in marketplaces ahead of the big shopping days:
- Product keywords
- Product images
- Product reviews and testimonials
- Product titles
- Product features
Pro Tip: Here are 4 tips to Increase Your Product Listing Quality. Customize product data and descriptions per channel more efficiently over the business holiday season.
2. Evaluate Your Inventory
When you’re selling across channels, inventory management across warehouses is vital to ensuring you have enough products to sustain sales over the prime day and the holiday season. Before you decide what to sell and how to sell it, you need to look at your current product inventory. You want to assess what products you have, which products you estimate will sell (based on current trends and past analytics), and what products you still need to order more of.
Your main goal should be boosting your sales by moving your inventory. By creating kits and bundles you can achieve this goal.
Pro Tip: If you’re dropshipping through various channels, I suggest using a Product Data Management Platform to help automate the product management process over the busy season – it will help you keep up with the increased orders. Check out our How to Manage Multiple Dropship Suppliers for more tips.
You want to check your stock levels, order extra inventory for your top-selling products, and look at best-selling product trends to anticipate new products you can sell. Remember, not every product sells the same on every channel, so make these estimates per platform.
3. Plan Your Pricing Strategies and Use Amazon Repricer
Next, you will want to plan strategies for product prices over the prime day and holiday season ahead. Your price strategies will be different per channel. For example, chances are you would need to be more competitive with your pricing on Amazon and make adjustments in real-time.
4. Prepare a Solid Fulfillment Plan
Once you’ve decided what products to push and estimated how many of those products you will sell, you want to make sure that you can handle the fulfillment. This is a big deal because people want their products delivered on time over the prime day and if you fall short on your fulfillment promises, it can mean bad reviews which in turn could hurt your business in the holiday season.
This is the time to review your shipping companies and services and make adjustments if they have fallen short before.
- Your shipping options
- Delivery Timeframes
- Shipping and return policies
5. Rev Up Your Support
Do you have enough hands to handle the increased sales and all the admin tasks such as fulfillment, marketing, customer service, and inventory management? This is a particular concern for eCommerce sellers doing it all themselves. It’s natural to want to keep spending down, taking full advantage of increased products. However, bringing in some support staff or third-party services to help in a variety of areas will not only ensure you don’t burn out before the prime day and holiday shopping season is over but also capitalize on increased sales opportunities.
6. Plan Your Marketing and Promotional Strategies
Now that you’ve planned what you’re selling, at what price, it’s time to plan out your marketing strategies. This includes which marketing platforms you will use and the campaign types, content, and targeting you will be using. At the very least, your marketing platforms should include Google Shopping and search, Amazon Sponsored Products, email marketing, Facebook, and possibly Instagram campaigns. When it comes to the types of campaigns you should be planning to run, here are some suggestions:
- Teaser and sneak-peak campaigns to create hype around your sales
- Pre-sale campaigns pushing promotions ahead of the shopping days
- Campaigns targeting your most loyal shoppers with VIP deals
- Post-Cyber Monday campaigns for Christmas promotions
- Win-back campaigns to attract previous shoppers
Bonus Content: 6 Marketing Tips for Multi-Channel Sellers
7. Will You Handle the Rush? Do a Test Run!
And finally, before the shopping madness descends, do a test run. You want to make sure you can handle all those extra orders and deal with the support and shipping changes you will be implementing. You want proper systems, support, and tech in place to handle the rush and to test it beforehand. This Includes:
- Testing and using your Amazon listing software ahead of the rush
- Doing test orders to evaluate new shipping systems or services
- Coordinating with your suppliers to ensure they are of your new systems and estimated increased sales figures
- A/B test your PPC and marketing campaigns to get them optimized before the peak days.
Good Luck!