Amazon Prime Day is coming up fast. If you didn’t realize, or you didn’t think it was relevant, look at what happened on Prime Day 2018.
Over 100 million products were sold on Prime Day last year. That makes it the biggest shopping event in Amazon’s history – bigger than Christmas, Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
With a ton of new money and engaged shoppers flying around Amazon.com, it’s in your best interests to try and get a slice of the pie.
This article is going to cover everything you need to know ahead of this year’s event. What is Prime Day, when it is, and how you can use Prime Day to spark growth in your Amazon business.
What is Amazon Prime Day?
Since 2015, Amazon has run the event every year. Billed as a summer shopping event – the “Black Friday in July” – Prime Day is an event with a ton of one-day deals exclusive to Amazon Prime members.
The first Prime Day, on July 15th 2015, saw an 18% increase in orders compared to the previous year’s Black Friday. Since then, each year’s event has grown further, consistently outperforming Black Friday and Cyber Monday for Amazon.
In 2018 Prime Day was extended from 24 hours to 36 hours. This just so happened to be when Prime Day broke the threshold of 100 million sales, too.
When is Amazon Prime Day 2019?
Amazon is yet to announce the exact date of Prime Day.
They have let sellers know the deadline to send inventory in order to be eligible for Prime Day – June 27th.
Previous events took place on 15th July, 12th July, 10th July and 16th of July. So it stands to reason This year’s event will be around a similar time.
EDIT – Amazon has just announced the date(s) for Prime Day 2019. It will take place over July 15 & 16. This year’s event will run for a whole 48 hours.
Prime Day Tips for Sellers
Amazon does a lot of work to drive shoppers to their platform on Prime Day… and since its inception, it’s pretty clear that it’s worked.
The end result is a lot more excited, engaged shoppers on Amazon looking for great deals. This is something you can (and should) leverage for your Amazon business.
On the lower end, Prime Day can be a nice one-day sales boost, enough to have a little more cash flow and inventory turnaround this month.
A really successful Prime Day could give you momentum that translates into a long-term upswing – better rankings, and more organic sales.
There are a few things you can do to increase the chances of your Prime Day being a success.
Plan your Prime Day strategy
As the saying goes: “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. So the first step to having a successful Prime Day is to plan your strategy.
Think what you want to accomplish, which product(s) you want to push, and how you want to do it. Don’t sit back and expect to get more sales without doing anything.
If you don’t want to do anything for Prime Day, that’s fine too. “Business as usual” is a strategy. It may be that you don’t have the profit margins to keep up with high-cost Prime Day promotions.
As long as you’ve thought it through, you’re doing your bit to take control of your business.
Stock up on inventory
If you’re planning to run any promotions on Prime Day, make sure you have enough inventory.
One of the best cases that could come out of a strong Prime Day promotion is a boost in BSR, and momentum that carries on to give you a boost in organic sales in the following weeks.
This momentum will all be lost if you sell out of your product. You’re going to be out of stock for however long it takes to re-stock. Your rankings will take a hit, so will your cash flow and your brand.
Promotions are costly (Prime Day promotions even more so). They’re generally considered an investment, which pays off in full-price sales later on. Your investment will amount to nothing if you run out of stock.
Set up campaigns ahead of schedule
When you leave things to the last minute, bad things happen.
For an event as big as Prime Day, be sure to get everything set up well ahead of schedule. That way, if any change of plans are needed, there’s more than enough time to take care of it.
You don’t want to be in the position of waiting for ads to be approved on the eve of Prime Day. Amazon’s a big machine, and it often takes time for the wheels to turn. Give plenty of time for them to handle things on their end.
Optimize your listing & ads (if you haven’t already)
Competition on Prime Day is fierce. That means poor optimization is not going to cut it.
First thing you want to do is make sure your listing is optimized. Not just for keywords, but for your customers too.
Images, heading, copy should all be designed to encourage someone to buy. Too many sellers optimize their listings for an algorithm, not a human. This doesn’t help the listing convert into actual sales.
There are a lot of promotions flying around on Prime Day. Any doubt, due to confusing copy or poor images, could be enough to make someone choose a better deal from a competitor.
The other thing to look at is your PPC. More shoppers means more potential eyes on your ads. The impact of poor or well optimized ads will be magnified.
Now is a great time to do an audit of your campaigns. Get rid of or improve anything that isn’t working, and pump up what is.
If you’re unsure where to start, this article has some good tips on optimizing your PPC ads.
Best Strategies for Amazon Sellers on Prime Day
Earlier we mentioned having a solid strategy in place. It’s not a good idea to go into Prime Day blind.
Prime Day lightning deals are the gold standard for Amazon promotions, appearing for a limited time on Amazon’s deals page. The scarcity is a great sales driver, and they’re well promoted by Amazon.
Lightning deals can be super competitive though – and multiply that by 100 on Prime Day. Amazon’s algorithm decides which deals are best, and most likely to sell well. These deals get the best visibility, while others get buried.
There is certain criteria to be able to apply for lightning deals, such as having a seller rating of at least 3.5 stars, and having at least 5 seller feedback ratings per month on your account.
If you qualify for lightning deals, and can offer deals that satisfy Amazon’s algorithm, then go for it. But many sellers might not have the means to do this.
Here’s a guide to how you can craft your Prime Day strategy.
On-Amazon promotions: coupons, sponsored brands and Amazon PPC
The bread and butter of your strategy will obviously be promotions on Amazon. Prime Day means more traffic on Amazon, which you can leverage into sales with enticing promotions.
Some of your options for on-Amazon promotion include:
- Coupons
- Sponsored Product Ads
- Sponsored Brands Ads (brand registry is required for this)
You might already be running PPC ads such as Sponsored Product or Sponsored Brand Ads. As mentioned above, this is a great opportunity to take these campaigns, optimize them, and bump up your budget for a short time.
Amazon Coupons are another great option to drive sales on Prime Day. They show up with a flag on your product listing, as well as on your Sponsored Product Ads and Amazon’s Coupons page. All your customers need to do is “clip” the coupon and get their discount.
Coupons are easy for shoppers to use, and they help you get extra visibility on your products. For this reason, they’re probably the go-to for on-Amazon promotions.
Push high-performing products
A common idea is to use Prime Day to get rid of lagging inventory – clear out products that aren’t selling well.
In theory this makes sense, but in practice it doesn’t tend to work so well. There’s a reason these products don’t sell well, and most of the time a Prime Day special won’t change that.
A better idea, that is more likely to produce a positive ROI, is doubling down on your best-sellers. These are the products that have already proven to do well, and already have decent organic visibility.
Products like this are going to be much easier to produce results from. Additionally, these are your potential cash cows, with which you could see a big impact from the momentum of a successful Prime Day promotion.
Incorporate Prime Day in your off-Amazon ad strategy
While on-Amazon is where you’re going to get the most return, it doesn’t mean you can’t use off-Amazon promotions in your Prime Day strategy too.
It’s a good idea to promote your deals in external channels (such as Facebook, other social media ads or email), to increase visibility.
You can also piggyback off the hype from Prime Day by mentioning this in your ad copy. The social proof of Amazon, and Amazon Prime Day, can potentially increase clicks and conversions from your ads.
This is where you may be able to run through some of your lesser-performing products. These products are unlikely to get visibility on Amazon, but you have more control over that in off-Amazon channels.
If you’re driving external traffic to your Prime Day promotions, best practice is always to use a landing page.
Set up a LandingCube promo page for a single-use promo code, or a product-only page if you’re driving traffic to a product with a coupon. This allows you to pixel and retarget your customers, and promote your brand much better than you can on Amazon alone.
Amazon Prime Day – An Opportunity to Grow Your Business
Prime Day is huge for Amazon. In fact, it’s now their biggest shopping event of the year, bigger even than Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
However, Amazon doesn’t have to be the only one who sees a positive return from Prime Day. More business for Amazon means more potential for third-party sellers too.
Take advantage of the hype and excitement around Prime Day. Stock up on inventory. Optimize your listings and PPC ads. Set up killer promotions for your best-selling products.
Doing so will help you leverage Prime Day into powerful momentum for your Amazon store.