Prime Day is back for Amazon sellers from 16 to 17 July 2023!
So, to make sure you’re ready for this unmissable promotional event, we’ve put together some practical information and advice for you and your marketplaces team.
Here’s how to pull off one of the biggest sales operations of the year. ⏬
SUMMARY
- What is Prime Day?
a. Practical information
b. Why take part in Prime Day? - Our tips for boosting your Prime Day sales
a. Prepare your promotions
b. Check and update your stocks
c. Manage and track your orders
d. Attend to your customer communication
e. Adapt your catalogue for international sales
f. Make the most of Prime Day with Amazon’s marketing tools
1. What is Prime Day?
a. Practical information
Prime Day is a “high impact” sales operation created by the Amazon marketplace. The first edition dates back to July 2015. This event was initially launched by Amazon to celebrate its 20th anniversary and to thank its Amazon Prime members for their loyalty – a prerequisite for participating as a customer.
The principle: for 48 hours, the platform offers good deals to its millions of members around the world.
This sales operation is of course an opportunity for you, as sellers, to spotlight your best offers during these 2 days of high traffic on the marketplace. Note that to take part you must be part of the Prime programme and your products must be eligible.
Indeed, to be part of this programme, you must fulfil certain conditions as a seller: have a professional sales plan, have excellent performance, etc. As for your products, they must also meet a number of criteria: have a sales history, be eligible for Amazon Prime in all regions, have a good rating, etc.
📌 Prime Day best-selling products
Prime Day best-selling products follow the Black Friday trend with, in the main, items in the High-Tech category including Amazon’s own brands (Fire TV Stick, Echo Dot…) and also Home.
You don’t sell products in these categories? Don’t worry, all realms are represented during the 2 days of Prime Day: gaming, fashion, bedding, food, beauty, etc…
👉🏼 If you are an Amazon Vendor customer, the marketplace will even offer you suggestions on which products to spotlight during Prime Day.😉
b. Why take part in Prime Day?
Who hasn’t heard of Amazon? As an e-tailer you probably already sell your products on the marketplace… 😉
So it’s a very good idea to take part in one of the largest sales operations conducted by the world’s leading e-commerce site.
If you have the financial, human and logistical resources to sell internationally, then this is also an opportunity to develop your sales thanks to the marketplace’s global reach.
And it’s even easier if you use a feed manager like BeezUP, thanks to the offer matching feature.
The platform works hard to make the event a success every year. In 2022, it offered new features to improve the customer experience: personalised recommendations, real-time notifications of promotions by Alexa, the French companies’ shop and the stylish presentation to highlight the products sold by French e-tailers…Which helped attract even more customers!
Schedule a promotion in BeezUP from the ‘StandardPrice’ field via a personalised field using validity dates.
Basically, this is an opportunity to reach customers, active members of the platform, before, during and after Prime Day! Indeed, proposing competitive offers while ensuring a good experience for your buyers during Prime Day is bound to pay off in the long run. Amazon paying a lot of attention to vendor SLA* and to sales volumes.
📌 Prime Day in figures
- Amazon Prime members purchased more than 100,000 items per minute during Prime Day 2022.**
- Customers spent more than $3 billion on more than 100 million items sold by small businesses in the “Support Small Businesses to Win Big” lottery in 2022.**
- Peak shopping took place on the first day of the event between 6pm and 7pm (CET) worldwide in 2022.
- 53% of shoppers said they were likely or very likely to repurchase a product after Prime Day.***
* SLA (Service Level Agreement): a contract or part of a contract that guarantees a level of service offered by an IT provider (in this case the marketplace) to its customers. By selling on the provider’s platform, you must comply with these commitments
**Source : Amazon
*** Kantar Quickfire survey, 2022. 3,008 respondents (in the following countries: The US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, Japan, Australia) who shopped during Prime Day week in 2020 and/or 2021 and who plan to do so in 2022.
2. Our tips for boosting your Prime Day sales
a. Prepare your promotions
Promotions inevitably mean changes to the price of your offers… Strategically, commercially and technically, everything must be thought through beforehand.
It is in your interest to define an adapted pricing strategy so as not to impact your entire e-commerce strategy. Indeed, in addition to the usual costs (commissions according to product categories, cost of the marketplace subscription, etc.), you need to take into account your other sales operations already underway, your prices on other e-commerce platforms, and of course your own online shop and/or your physical points of sale… This is already the case if you have an omnichannel sales strategy.
Once you have set out your strategy, you need to schedule your price changes by manually modifying the fields on Amazon, which can be more or less tedious depending on the complexity of your catalog and the number of promotional products.
👉🏼 Also allow for enough time on that day to readjust your prices on other sales channels, if necessary.
To make this step easier, you can use a product feed management software like BeezUP to define very fine pricing rules according to your product types, your margin, your stocks… You can then apply a percentage discount on your products during Prime Day, without touching your source catalog. Quite practical, isn’t it? 😏
b. Check and update your stocks
Promotions can also mean running out of stock… Which we hope you do! But be careful not to sell products you don’t have, which can easily happen if your stocks are not updated regularly.
However, it is not so easy to be reactive enough during the big rushes – even less so if you are participating in other events such as parallel sales… 😥
However, you have to be, because a cancellation of an order will not only result in unhappy customers but also in penalties from the marketplace. Indeed, the marketplace imposes very strict rules on its sellers, called SLAs, to ensure an optimal shopping experience for its customers. No room for error…
Once again, a marketplace feed manager allows you to avoid these inconveniences thanks to its centralised and automated management of your stocks and orders. Indeed, by using our API or your e-commerce CMS module, your stocks are automatically deducted. You no longer have to worry about synchronising them!
In addition, you can even create rules so that your products are no longer distributed after a certain number of products in stock. This allows you room to manoeuvre in case of a defective or undelivered product for example…
To take the strain off the logistics, you can also use the Fulfillment* By Amazon (FBA) services. Just so you know, our BeezUP CMS modules also manage a stock dedicated to this service in order not to decrement your central stock. 😉
* Fulfillment” is a term that refers to all the tasks performed by an e-tailer to deliver a product to a customer. This includes all stages of the supply chain.
c. Manage and track your orders
In addition to the numerous operations that need to be done to manage your stocks – without a marketplaces feed manager – you will also have to go back and forth a lot to manually follow up and manage your orders on the Amazon back office.
This quickly becomes unmanageable when you realise that your workload increases tenfold during Prime Day and you are still managing your orders on your other marketplaces and points of sale. 😥
You should also be aware that you have a 24-hour order acceptance period imposed by Amazon. BeezUP’s auto-acceptance feature is very useful to meet this deadline and to comply with the marketplace’s SLAs.
d. Attend to your customer communication
We know that events such as Black Friday, French Day and Prime Day work so well partly because they are “high impact” operations. So the race is on to find good deals for your customers and it is in your interest to keep up with them, especially when responding to their messages so as not to impact your customer relations!
Whether it’s to answer their questions before the sale or to reassure them about their purchase after the sale.
And it’s not only your customers who impose a time limit on you, since Amazon asks its sales staff to respond to more than 90% of their messages within 24 hours (including weekends and public holidays)!
You have two options:
- Either, you can go back and forth on your Amazon seller space to answer each customer message, taking the risk of not answering in time…
- Or, you choose a tool to manage your marketplaces customer messages, such as “Conversations” which will not only allow you to centralise your discussions but also your order information and invoices in the same place to save time!
e. Adapt your catalog for international sales
As we said, Prime Day is an opportunity to boost your sales and develop your business internationally with Amazon, provided you don’t forget that:
- Your product types will not necessarily be the same depending on the country;
- Shipping costs and conditions vary from one destination to another…
- VAT rates are not the same for all countries and neither are the currencies…
The more countries you serve, the more you increase your already heavy workload at this time.
Here again, the automation of the product feed integrator can help you with personalised calculation rules to adapt your prices to all the conditions mentioned above. For example, you can apply different VAT rates or convert your prices from Euros to Dollars.
👉🏼 Don’t forget you need a multilingual team that can respond to customer messages from the countries you sell to.
📘 To go further, check out Amazon’s resources for more information on international markets.
f. Make the most of Prime Day with Amazon’s marketing tools
This is also a good time to run advertising campaigns on Amazon because you harness its marketing power and of course its traffic of millions of online shoppers before, during and after Prime Day.
We advise you to combine several promotional tools and to spread your ads budget over all phases of the event. And finally, don’t forget to optimise your product sheets to increase the click-through rate and the conversion rate 😉.
Like the sales or the Peak season sales operations, Prime Day requires a lot of preparation, organisation and reactivity from your e-commerce teams.
Although this event takes place on Amazon, it’s your brand image that’s at stake, and this can be easily damaged as it is difficult to ensure a 5-star shopping experience for all your customers during this type of sales operation. Not only can you lose money, but you can also generate a lot of negative reviews that will impact your products and your Amazon seller profile in the long run.
So, before you launch, you need to check every aspect of your buying journey, to ensure that you have sufficient staff to respond to messages, prepare offers, change prices, manage stock updates and returns to customers…
If you are lacking internal resources, choosing a feed manager is essential to ensure the smooth running of this type of promotional event, as well as its profitability. You and your team will save time and earn peace of mind thanks to its automation.
You no longer have any excuse for not pulling off one of the biggest sales operations of the year 😉.
Annabelle Granulant
Content Manager at BeezUP