For Amazon sellers, it’s time to review some last minute checklists to prepare for Amazon’s Prime Early Access sale. Amazon has announced the sale will be taking place on October 11-12, 2022.
Amazon states that “Prime Early Access Sale gives members a chance to kick off the holiday shopping season early with hundreds of thousands of deals. As part of the new deals event, Amazon is introducing a Top 100 list of some of the season’s most popular and gift-able items. New deals from the list will drop throughout the event, offering deep savings across all top categories, including electronics, fashion, home, kitchen, pets, toys, and Amazon devices. Holiday gift guides and Amazon’s Toys We Love list will also make it easier for Prime members to discover, shop, and save on deals this holiday season.”
The title “Prime Early Access Sale” implies that Amazon customers are getting early access to deals before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which take place in November.
If the second Amazon Prime Day this fall stays consistent with past Amazon events, we expect Amazon electronics/devices, beauty products, and personal care items to be top sellers.
Here’s how Amazon sellers can prepare for Amazon’s Prime Early Access sale taking place next week…
Prepare for Amazon’s Prime Early Access Sale
Optimize Campaigns
- Optimize your PPC campaigns and start doing A/B testing with listings and prices.
- Check out our post on how to identify your ideal PPC spend.
Revamp Product Listings
- High-quality images, optimized product titles/descriptions, and “prime day relevant” keywords will help boost your sales. Check out our post on how to optimize your listings for sales events.
Review Inventory and Account Health
- Check your account health and performance.
- Ensure you have enough inventory to meet consumer demands. Running out of stock hurts your rankings and sales. Amazon has limited capacity for FBA inventory. So for some items, sellers will opt for FBM (Fulfillment by Merchant) to handle the process themselves. This is a good practice for your most popular items at risk of going out of stock. Check out our post on how to forecast inventory for Amazon.
Create Competitive Deals
- Submit deals for multiple products with competitive prices.
- Ensure that the deals you run on Amazon match that of other retailers. This is to prevent your listings from losing the buy box.
- On the morning of the sale, check out competitors within your category. By offering a better deal, conquest their product listing through strategic ASIN targeting and keyword bidding.
Run Advertisements
- If you have a product that wasn’t eligible for an exclusive prime day deal, run your advertisements and discounts. Take advantage of the increased traffic during the event.
- When creating promotions, note that a 20% off coupon is the minimum to see a significant spike in sales.
- Create special Sponsored Brand Ads that highlight discounted products.
- Create complementary product bundles to drive even more sales.
- Ensure that your advertising budgets and bids are opened up and increased the night before Prime Day starts. Take advantage of the typical spike in day one sales.
Drive External Traffic
- Self-promote Amazon deals on social media, emails, and external ads. Don’t forget to leverage resources such as Amazon Live and Amazon Posts.
- Consider getting assistance from a PR firm to get press features that will drive external traffic to Amazon.
- Consider partnering with influencers on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram to promote your Amazon products leading up to Prime Day, and even promote specific Prime Day deals. Check out our post How to Use Amazon Influencers to Drive Sales.
Track Your Performance
- The Q3 / Q4 Amazon Sales events are important times to be closely monitoring your performance. Make changes to your ads or PPC campaigns as needed.
- If your inventory runs out at a faster rate than expected, plan to send more inventory to FBA or plan to ship the products yourself using third-party fulfillment or your own warehouse.
- If your sales are slow consider reviewing your PPC campaigns and increasing bids for certain keywords.
- Monitor the status and overall performance of your account with a tool like myHorizons, and take care of any problems that arise immediately so that there is no downtime for your listings. Start your 30 day free trial of myHorizons, sign up now.
