For cross-border sellers, Amazon Prime Day has long been one of the most important events of the year. Prime Day 2019 sales hit a record $7.16 billion, up from $4.19 billion in 2018, and just behind the $7.4 billion in online sales on Black Friday 2019.
Prime Day has been confirmed to take place on October 13-14th, and due to the COVID-19 pandemic, sellers have been forced to rethink their Prime Day strategies. This year, we’ve seen a dramatic shift in purchasing behavior, with products suitable to life at home surging, while items related to travel and leisure recording a significant drop in sales.
As Prime Day gets closer and closer, now’s the time to get your store ready. Here, we’ll be discussing what makes this Prime Day different, especially regarding how you should manage your inventory and market your store to help maximize sales.
New Inventory Management Rules on Amazon Seller Central
There are three basic changes in Amazon Seller Central that will be relevant for this year’s Prime Day:
- IPI minimum threshold – Amazon has changed their IPI minimum threshold requirement to 500, meaning it will be crucial to ensure you don’t have either excess inventory or stockouts. Furthermore, you’ll need to keep your product sell-throughs relevant, as well as stranded inventory current. This can be very challenging, especially if you don’t control the shipment process.
- Quantity limits – Regardless of whether your IPI score is above or below 500, you’ll still be subject to ASIN quantity limits. This will be individually determined for each ASIN separately, based on its previous sales velocity performance.
- Free removals promotion – To help sellers remove stranded and aged inventory and improve their IPI scores, Amazon started offering removal orders free of charge.
How Does This Impact Your Prime Day Preparations?
Seller Fulfilled Prime is a great way to deal with Amazon’s new inventory management rules. It’s recommended for high-performing accounts that meet the following conditions:
- A product shipping rate of 99%.
- A product cancellation rate lower than 0.5%.
- A valid tracking rate of 99%.
Additionally, you might want to take the following steps when making your Prime Day preparations:
- Negotiate with your suppliers – If you’re able, negotiate with your suppliers for a better price if you order additional units. You can then use your savings to keep part of your inventory with a 3rd party service provider.
- Set aside funds for airline shipments – Airline shipments are a good way to move smaller quantities of your stock in case you sell out faster than expected. This will help you avoid high fees for air freight, as you’ll only be sending small quantities. It will also help you avoid prolonged stockout periods.
Effectively Marketing Your Store for Prime Day 2020
This Prime Day is unique, in that it’s likely to fall only a few weeks before stores begin their holiday promotions, as well as Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. The tips below can help you effectively market your store so that it stands out this Prime Day:
- Amazon listing optimization – Listing optimization is a twofold process consisting of:
- Organic ranking optimization (for the A9 algorithm).
- Conversion rate optimization through good copy that resonates with your customers.
- Coupons & discounts – Customers expect a lot of discounts and deals on Prime Day. Use this to your advantage by discounting a few top-of-funnel items from your inventory that can be used as an introduction to your brand and generate repeat customers.
- Discount sites and micro influencers – There are a lot of websites that promote discounts to online stores. If you’re preparing a discount, these stores can help generate traffic to your store, boosting your organic ranking (something that Amazon’s algorithm really appreciates). Similarly, micro-influencers are a great way to generate traffic and improve your listing’s conversion rate.
- Additional ad types – Amazon now offers different types of ad campaigns, including sponsored products, sponsored brands ads and sponsored display ads. Some of the most recent ad formats that really help you grab customer’s attention online are video ads, which generate high click-through-rates. Also, product targeting for sponsored display ads (now in beta), is currently showing lower cost per click than usual.
- Prime-specific ad campaigns – You can attract more traffic by targeting keywords that are “prime” oriented in your Amazon PPC campaigns, including “prime day deals” and “lighting deals of the day”, or product-specific terms, like “prime day tv deals”.
- Amazon Posts – Amazon Posts is an effective tool to generate brand awareness. It was recently introduced to the Amazon advertising console to enable the advertisers to write short form content that drives engagement and helps products stand out. This content is free and easy to make. Recently, Amazon allowed scheduled posts (like boosted posts on Facebook), so we’re excited to see how this feature evolves.
Conclusion
With the COVID-19 pandemic still very much impacting every part of our day-to-day lives, we’re sure preparing for Amazon Prime Day 2020 isn’t going to be easy. It’s important to take control over your business where you can. Changing consumer trends can present a lot of great opportunities for cross-border sellers, something you’ll want to factor into your Prime Day preparations.
Additionally, you’ll want to consider some of the other upcoming holidays, including Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Columbus Day, Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Hanukkah, Christmas, Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve. Check out Payoneer’s 2020 eCommerce Calendar for a complete list of upcoming holidays and update your Amazon Posts accordingly – customers appreciate relevant and timely content coming from the same brand in a predictable manner.
Jelena Nuhanovic is a PPC veteran in charge of designing successful strategies at Amazonia PPC. Since 2013 she has helped 150+ businesses in 90 different industries achieve measurable results when it comes to using online channels to generate leads, attract more customers and increase revenue.