Amazon Prime Day is one of the biggest retail holidays which shoppers look forward to. Prime Day is the “Black Friday” version of Amazon. Since Prime Day was launched, the sales throughout the years have grown significantly. In fact, Amazon revealed to have sold more than 175 million products from its 2019 Prime Day event! That’s a multi-billion dollar sales just from a two-day event!
As an Amazon e-tailer, getting your products included on Prime Day can boost your sales revenue. However, participating in Prime Day can be costly too. If you haven’t participated in Prime Day before, now’s the great idea to learn everything you need to know about Amazon Prime Day.
In today’s article, we will cover how you can prepare for Amazon Prime Day and make the most out of the biggest e-commerce event in history.
What is Prime Day?
Amazon Prime Day is a retail holiday launched on July 15, 2015, as part of Amazon’s 20th Anniversary. Prime Day is a summer shopping event exclusively for Prime members. Although with its growing popularity, Prime Day is now coined as the Cyber Monday and Black Friday of online shopping.
Every year, Amazon Prime Day consistently broke its sales from its previous year and becomes a multi-billion dollar event. Amazon has extended the celebration for a few more hours every year: 30 hours in 2017, 36 hours in 2018, and a full 48 hours in 2019.
When is Amazon Prime Day?
Amazon Prime Day has no known official dates. Amazon keeps the exact date a secret and only reveals the date a few days ahead.
How Long is Prime Day?
Amazon Prime Day initially lasted for 24 hours. However, for the past few years with the extensive growth of shoppers participating in the event, Prime Day extends the celebration for several more hours: 30 hours in 2017, 36 hours in 2018, and full 48 hours in 2019.
What Countries are Participating in Prime Day?
Prime Day is celebrated in 18 countries including the United States, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Spain, Singapore, Netherlands, Mexico, Luxembourg, Japan, Italy, India, Germany, Austria, France, China, Canada, Belgium, and Australia.
Benefits of Prime Day for Vendors and Sellers
Participating in Prime Day is expensive, but it has pros and cons. Selling on Prime Day can give you a very impressive amount of sales in just 1-2 days, although it can blow your advertising budget in a short span of time. Initially, the first two years of Prime Day is free, but in its third year, Amazon introduced a registration fee of $500 per lightning deal.
This hefty price tag might intimidate many sellers, but this can be the reason why Amazon placed an impressive price on Prime Day participation. This way, Amazon sellers will impose more effective promotional strategies to sell their products, increasing the overall quality of lightning deals during the event.
What Are the Preparations Needed to Participate in Prime Day?
100% decided to participate on Prime Day? Here are the things you can do to prepare for the event!
Prime Day Lightning Deals
Lightning deals are usually found inside Amazon’s deal page. Lightning promotions usually last for 4 hours during Prime Day. However, take note that submitting your product lightning deals does not guarantee that your product will be visible.
But worry not! Amazon picks the best deals of products through price, quantity, and inventory from the tons of lightning submissions with Amazon’s algorithm.
Amazon Lightning Deals Requirements (Sellers):
Not all Amazon sellers are eligible to participate in Prime Day. In order to be qualified, here are the requirements Amazon implement to participate in the event:
- Professional Amazon Seller account
- Product’s feedback or rating should be at least 3.5 stars
- Minimum 5 seller feedback per month
Aside from that, your products should also be eligible for lightning deals. In order for you to verify if your product is qualified for the lightning deal, check the recommendations on your lightning dashboard. If it’s not showing up, then that means your product is not eligible for lightning deals.
Amazon Lightning Deals Requirements (Vendors):
Here are the requirements vendors need to meet:
- Active retail offer
- At least 3 stars product review or rating by customers
- Units available should meet the projected demand of customers
- Discounted price should be:
- at least 20% off the current Amazon retail website price
- at least 5% lower than the lowest price in the past 28 days
- the lowest price as of January 1st
Other Ways to Promote Products on Prime Day
If you’re saddened that your products are not eligible for Prime Day, there are other ways that you can take advantage of the huge influx of customers during Prime Day:
Coupons
Coupons are very effective to grab the attention of Prime Day customers.
Coupons tag each product with an unmistakable discount label, guaranteeing visibility on every page and granting customers a discount of your choice.
A coupon will only become active two days after you have created it. Thus, you should set a reminder for the beginning of July for your coupons once the Prime Day date is confirmed.
Additionally, shoppers can see coupons on the following pages:
- Amazon coupon’s home page
- Search results
- Shopping cart
- Products pages
- In your Brand store
- In your Sponsored Products Ads and;
- Offers Listing page
Become More Visible in Prime Day Through Amazon Ads
Another effective way to get more traffic and sales to your products on Prime Day is none other than leveraging Amazon Ads. Specifically, Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. You can get your ads visible on Prime Day by:
Increasing Prime Day Advertising Budgets and Bids
Remember, Prime Day is a big event. Thus, a fierce competition to get their products visible on search results should be expected. Raise above the competition by increasing your bids.
Also, make your campaigns’ bidding set to Up and Down. Amazon will also increase (new) default bids if the clicks are convertible to sales.
Optimize Existing Campaigns
Do a major cleanup to your campaigns before Prime Day starts. Remember, you’ll be spending more for your campaigns during Prime Day so you have to make sure that the campaigns will run as efficiently as possible.
Find new better keywords and add negative keywords to get your ads more visible on customer’s search results.
Use Sponsored Brands
Both vendors and sellers can guide shoppers to their brand store by using Sponsored Brands.
It is an effective strategy since you can create a customized landing page for your brand store exclusively for Prime Day. You can also highlight the deals of your brand on your Prime Day landing page.
Prime Day 2020 might still be a half-year away from now, but it won’t hurt to get yourself ready for the largest e-shopping event of the year. Prepare as early as possible, start planning and testing strategies to get your products visible on Prime Day.
Let us know about your Prime Day plans through the comments below!
One Response
Nice to read your article, those are great ideas.