#575 – Amazon Prime Day Seller Roundtable

Get ready for an insightful episode as we gear up for Amazon Prime Day with strategies from some of the most experienced sellers in the business. We kick things off with Abdul, a seasoned seller who shares his journey of nearly a decade on Amazon. Listen in as Abdul recounts his best and worst Prime Day moments, including how he achieved a 2-3X sales increase last year without relying on costly promotions. Instead, Abdul utilized coupon codes, price adjustments, and leveraged off-Amazon traffic through social media and email campaigns. He also shares his game plan for this year, including starting targeted broadcasts a week before Prime Day to maximize engagement and sales.

Next, we shift gears to hear from Abe Chomali who has worked with multiple sellers, including a remarkable success story of a national electronics brand. This brand skyrocketed from $15,000 to $1 million in sales in a single day thanks to a premium deal position and massive advertising push. We also explore common pitfalls, such as internal miscommunications that can sabotage deals, and discuss the latest tactics for Prime Day 2024. Key strategies include leveraging new promotion types and recapturing potential sales from ad spend leading up to and during Prime Day.

Finally, we share diverse seller experiences and strategies for Prime Day from Rolando Rosas, Gonzalo Zamora, Carrie Miller, and Huy Nguyen, highlighting both successes and challenges. From managing PPC budgets effectively to the potential pitfalls of overspending on ads, we cover it all. Sellers like Rolando found that turning off PPC on Prime Day didn’t negatively impact sales, saving significant costs. We also explore the use of Amazon Live for increased exposure without extra expenditure and the crucial role of Helium 10 tools in managing campaigns and tracking performance. By leveraging tools like Helium 10’s Cerebro and Market Tracker, sellers can optimize for Prime Day-specific keywords and ensure continued sales momentum.

In episode 575 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Abdul, Abe, Gonzalo, Rolando, Carrie, and Huy discuss:

• 00:00 – Amazon Sellers Prime Day Strategy From Experienced Sellers
• 01:09 – Prime Day Strategy for New Sellers
• 02:54 – Improving Amazon Sales Strategies Over Time
• 08:15 – Maximizing Strategies for Prime Day
• 12:34 – New Strategies for Promotions and Sales
• 16:55 – Prime Day Sales Strategy Success
• 18:14 – Prime Day Strategies & Tools
• 27:19 – Successful Strategies for Prime Day Sales
• 35:20 – Optimizing Prime Day Sales Strategy

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Prime Day is coming up, so to continue in our series of Prime Day readiness episodes, we’ve invited seasoned Amazon sellers who’ve sold millions of dollars on the platform to give some of their best and worst stories from previous Prime Days along with what they’re planning to do this Prime Day. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Sellers have lost thousands of dollars by not knowing that they were hijacked, perhaps on their Amazon listing, or maybe somebody changed their main image, or Amazon changed their shipping dimensions so they had to pay extra money every order. Helium 10 can actually send you a text message or email if any of these things or other critical events happen to your Amazon account. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash alerts.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That’s a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Prime day was just announced, although, of course, helium 10 serious sellers podcast listeners have been knowing when prime day was going to be since April, since we predicted it but we weren’t sure. But now everybody’s sure July 16 and 17 is the day, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

So, if you’re a brand-new seller, by definition, this is going to be your first prime day, and so what I wanted to do is not just have me here give you guys a step-by-step tutorial. I wanted to bring different sellers on to ask them what their experience is, whether it’s their own accounts or maybe, uh, they have a lot of clients who they’ve helped with their prime days, and it’s funny, because the answer is not always oh, you’ve got to go all in the answer from some of these sellers. I’m not sure what they’re going to say. Some of the sellers might say you know what I don’t do extensive discounts on Prime Day, and that’s fine too. We want to make sure that we give you guys a complete view of what people are doing and not doing on Prime Day, but just know that, hey, there’s not just one size fits all, where there’s one strategy and everybody’s got to do it or else you’re a failure on Prime Day. I think that’s going to be, hopefully, the theme that you learn today that there’s different strokes for different folks, and it’s okay. So, the first seller I’m going to bring on the show with us today he’s been on the podcast before is Abdul.

Abdul, How’s it going?

Abdul:

Hey, Bradley, good, good and yourself.

Bradley Sutton:

Pretty good, pretty good Now. You and I have hung out all over the world. You used to come to our Elite workshops and we had it in California. I know at that time you were living in New Jersey. We’ve also hung out in Lahore, Pakistan. Is that where you’re at right now? Are you in Pakistan?

Abdul:

Yes, I am, and indeed.

Bradley Sutton:

So, what time is it over there?

Abdul:

So, we’re like 12 hours ahead of you. It’s like 11PM.

Bradley Sutton:

11PM. Thank you for coming on so late. Now for people who maybe haven’t heard your Serious Sellers podcast episodes. How long have you been selling on Amazon?

Abdul:

So, we’re going up to eight, nine years, but the first few years were not so good. I did everything wrong, and just after that it’s just been fixing things and it’s been a roller coaster.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now, eight, nine years you’ve been there for the prime days and so tell us let me just start off, this is going to be a similar question as what I’m going to ask others what was the best thing you’ve ever done on a prime day? Like, maybe it could have even been an accident, but what’s the best Prime Day result you had where maybe sales were up 50%, sales were up 4X? Whatever the case, what can you remember was your best Prime Day?

Abdul:

I think 2X, 3X last year was good.

Bradley Sutton:

Was that coming from a certain strategy, like, did you run Prime exclusive discounts, a lightning deal, or was it just 100% organic extra traffic?

Abdul:

So, that’s something we did not do last year. Last year we did not do exclusive discounts, flash sales, because I think correct me if I’m wrong those are usually 200, 300 per ASIN. They can get very pricey quickly, right, sure? So, we did not do that. Last year we did a lot of. We signed up for whatever free we could find and we ran coupon codes, discounts. We fixed our pricing beforehand to make sure that our prices were just right, leading a month, two months before the Prime Days.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so what was your strategy right before Prime Day? Did you have anything different that you did leading up to Prime Day?

Abdul:

No PPC ran as usual. We just kept an eye. If anything was running out of budget, we would put more juice into those PPC campaigns. Otherwise, we were just concentrating on coupon codes off Amazon advertisements. We have a large following now, so we send out messages on our social media, on our email distributions, so bringing a lot of off Amazon traffic to our store.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, yeah, that’s definitely good. And so, what are you doing in that regards for this year? Like, what’s your plans leading up to this year’s Prime Day? What kind of promotions are you doing for your off Amazon this year? Like, what’s your plans leading up to this year’s Prime Day? Are you what kind of promotions are you doing for your off-Amazon traffic? Are you like telling them, hey, we’re going to have a Prime Day discount, or something like that?

Abdul:

So yeah, leading now that it’s announced because people my customers don’t like vague, it’s going to happen in June, July. So as soon as it’s announced, you start preparing for your broadcast. So roughly a week before anything you do a week before the dates, it’s just prepping. You can’t. People don’t take that seriously. So, say, about seven to 10 days, you start, you hit them with the first message and you have a series of follow-ups A lot of many chats, if you have subscribers in many chats. A lot of emails. My social media if I have Facebook following or Instagram following you just start hitting them with what your deal is, what your products are, where to find them and to remind them. Don’t go to my website, have the Amazon logo prominent. So usually, I don’t like to drive people to Amazon store my Amazon products. I like them to go from social media to my own website. But this will be an exception.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, what are you telling them, like, what are you doing? Are you doing prime exclusive discount? Are you just going to have a clippable coupon? Are you just running a discount as a regular discount price offer? What are, what is your plans for this July 16, 17?

Abdul:

I think it’s going to be a visible coupon code this year, clippable discounts or typical clippable coupons. People tend to forget, so if something is right in front of them for everyone to see, as soon as someone lands on my page on my product, I want them to see the discount and I want them to be able to just apply the coupon and you don’t want to put any hurdles in front of them.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s your projected sales this year? Just so people have an idea about your level. What do you think you’re going to hit for overall Not for Prime Day, but for your year. We’re about halfway through the year. What do you think you’re going to end up at?

Abdul:

This year has been a challenge. I have a lot of hijackers Just before Prime Day. I would touch that. We do see a lot of activity where they’re using that infamous. There’s a new badge, often return badge I’m being hit with that with my best sellers, and there’s every year we see that. So that’s been a struggle. We have to keep an eye on that and honestly, I struggle with that every year, yeah, so it’s hard to say. It’s always a surprise. It’s hard to put a number on what this year is going to be like.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, but what was your best year? Was it during COVID?

Abdul:

During COVID, yeah, we were hitting 60,000 sales, 60k a month, so that was our best time. But after that I had some family issues still dealing with sick parents, so I haven’t been able to give it much time and attention like I used to.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, that’s the beauty about Amazon. You can be at home in New Jersey pushing it. You can go home to Pakistan to take care of family and still be running your business. That’s the beauty about our industry. Well, Abdul, I wish you the best of success for this year’s Prime Day. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us and yeah, we’ll definitely connect after to see how it was all right.

Abdul:

You’re welcome. Thank you, take care.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up, we’ve got Abe coming on. Your kind of a contrast with Abdul’s just working with his own account, but you see many people’s accounts because you work with a lot of sellers and so you’ve got some unique, unique viewpoints as far as selling on Prime Day and what you should do and what you shouldn’t do. So, a similar question like amongst you know different accounts you’ve worked on previous Prime Day, is there something that was sticks out as like the best Prime Day for somebody? Like what’s a cool anecdote you could provide us?

Abe:

Yeah. So, this anecdote is one which really stuck out by itself. It’s one which is going to apply to very few sellers, but it was an eye popper. So, I work with a brand that has national distribution, so it’s a recognized brand, and I work with them to sell a line of electronics like in the $200 plus price range. Now we were having trouble getting traction because in the electronics category there are lots of foreign competitors that sell the same thing for 40% less. So, the brand said we really want to make a push, we really want to see if it’s possible to make Amazon pop. They were able to get a SAS core rep. They were able to work with the SAS core rep and say we want a premium deal position on prime day, something that’s not in the dashboard, because there are spots that you can get that are not in the dashboard. When you have a SAS core rep, they vet you and they have to make sure that they think you can sell that amount. And that’s part of the key, because they say this spot can sell $4 million for us. If you can’t sell and you can’t fulfill $4 million, we don’t even want to talk to you. That’s worth what the spot is.

Abe:

So, they were vetted, they were checked. They actually they couldn’t even send enough inventory because Amazon could not process it. They had to share the information from their warehouses with Amazon and they accepted the information. Well, that day, prime Day, every single thing was turned all the way on. We launched 30 campaigns of every ad type, you know four different autos at different price points, high-priced ranking campaigns like every single type you’ve ever heard an experiment about. All launched on the same day and in 24 hours, they went from selling $15,000 a day on one on the hero skew. They sold a million dollars in one day of that skew, which is something like.

Bradley Sutton:

$15,000 to 1 million on that. So that means that there had to be a good number that was fulfilled by merchant too, because no way they had all that inventory in Amazon.

Abe:

Right yeah. three quarters of it was filled by merchant. yeah, so it can’t be reproduced. A lot of people suggest very impressive things like it could be done if you flip the right switch. No, this is not. I would be surprised if I ever am part of a thing like this again. But I had the front row seat for it.

Bradley Sutton:

I love that. I love that. Now let’s talk about the complete opposite. What was a disaster for somebody? Like somebody just did nothing, or maybe somebody screwed up on their discounts or they didn’t realize it could stack, or have you ever what’s the worst prime day you’ve ever heard of that happened to somebody?

Abe:

The worst prime day. It’s a thing that keeps happening, but it’s just as bad. Every single time it happens you have somebody who is not working with somebody else within the same company. They launch a coupon a week before. The new low price of 30 days is below the price of the submitted deal. Boom, your deal does not run. And every time it happens there’s a meltdown because people count on prime day and all of a sudden it didn’t work. They can’t understand why. They tell me, Hey, why aren’t we selling? Where’s the volume? Why aren’t we even showing for the deal? I said did anybody in your place run any kind of discount or coupon in the last couple of weeks? Cause we don’t get a notification about everything they do in their account? And all of a sudden, you’ll hear the yelling that Bob ran a coupon two weeks ago. What are we doing, Bob? He ruined everything!

Bradley Sutton:

Wow! Okay, so now what you know, things have changed in the last, in the last Prime Day. You know there’s new rules as far as like discounts and coupons and plus there’s new ways to. You know there’s. I don’t I don’t know if brand Taylor promotions has been around for a full year yet, but I don’t I’m not sure if that was around last year.

Abe:

They keep changing it, so yeah, and.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, and yeah, even the one. Even in itself, it’s not what it was two months ago, you know. So, right. So, with that, all that in mind, we’re now talking about 2024 Prime Day. What are some general things that that trying this year with some of these new changes in mind.

Abe:

So, the number one thing we’re going to be trying is, like you mentioned, the brand tailor promotions. There’s something like 10 different types of promotions in there and what we’re doing with every brand we work with, we’re actually setting aside an hour for time to work with them instead of our usual, you know, shorter amount of time. We say listen, we need to spend an hour to look at each one, read the terms of what each one applies to and think about if this applies to our brand and if it does, let’s lean into it. And with Prime Day, a number of those discounts are for people who looked at your product but didn’t buy, for people who put it in your cart but didn’t buy. And we want to know. What we want to do is all of the ad spend that we spent leading up to Prime Day, all of the money that we spent on Prime Day that didn’t turn into sales. We want to do anything we can to capture it in the days and 10 days or two weeks afterwards.

Bradley Sutton:

Prime Day already has a lot of, you know, better conversion rate than normal days because people are coming on Amazon with more intent to buy. But if you are targeting people who already had even intent to buy before, because they added to the cart but they abandoned it you know that’s one of the brand cart or cart abandoners is one of the brand tailor promotions that’s like should do even better for you if, like, they’re already coming on Amazon and they’re already somebody who almost pulled the trigger on buying your product before. So that’s, I think that’s a great strategy to target, to target them.

Abe:

Yeah, I mean these brand tailor promotions have. In some cases, they’ve been fantastic. They do what DSP promised to do, which is to chase people around after they originally looked at you. These promotions are doing it more effectively than DSP in a lot of cases, because it’s really direct and a big thing which is key is that they gave us the ability to run these promos at an ASIN level, which was originally it was just for the brand overall and at that point it was really clumsy in terms of running deals plus stacking something that goes across your whole brand.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you doing anything differently in Helium 10 as far as for Prime Day, like doing some historical research or looking at search volumes, or is just kind of like saying you know keyword tracker, paying special attention, or it’s kind of like business as usual for you?

Abe:

So, I’ll tell you one of the features we love best and I’m not sure which level of Helium 10 you need for it is the historical rank tracker for keywords. In Cerebro we love to compare time periods and with the accounts that are connected long enough, we can see how Prime Day did last year and we can compare Prime Day to different peak periods and we use those to set budgets. The number one thing we do when managing Prime Day, we don’t do much with bids. We don’t have a special bidding program for Prime Day the number one thing is being visible to shoppers as long as possible during the day, which is budget management. And the budget management goes also along with inventory management. You have to have enough product to sell and then you have to show enough to sell all the product you have. That’s where all the planning comes in and that’s where all the holes fall apart. Usually, either people didn’t plan enough inventory, either people didn’t assess the impact of their discounts against their regular margins, and then nothing is left over to spend on an actual ad. There’s all the different parts that work together. But going back to Helium 10, it gives us an idea of how much of a boost we need in order to get full coverage those days.

Bradley Sutton:

Thank you so much for joining us and giving us your insights and definitely want to keep us updated in the Elite Facebook group to let us know how some of these things worked out for you.

Abe:

Be happy too.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m going to invite three people on at the same time. We’re just going to have kind of like a mini round table for the next few minutes and let’s go ahead and invite the next group. We’ve got Gonzalo, we’ve got Rolando and we’ve got Carrie. So, we’ve got three experienced Amazon sellers of different of different levels, but experienced Amazon sellers of different levels, but all have multiple prime days under their belt. So, we’re going to start with our two guests. Gonzalo, you’ve been on the Spanish podcast. I’ve never had you on the English podcast before, though right.

Gonzalo:

Right.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so give us some of your background. Where are you based and tell us how long you’ve been selling on Amazon.

Gonzalo:

I’m based in Chile in South America, in Santiago, and I have been a seller from 2019 before COVID.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so you’ve got about like you know, depending on if you’re counting the prime deal days or the other one that comes up, you know you got at least three, four prime days under your belt. Now let’s just stick with you for a second here. What was your best prime day results. Like where it was really a big increase over sales, and then if you can remember what contributed to that.

Gonzalo:

I have one that I X by three in one year. That was pretty amazing.

Bradley Sutton:

Was it by accident, or did you do something different that year that really worked?

Gonzalo:

Actually, it was the one that I set as basis for the next year and I replied the same strategy from them. And what I make is, on my top seller product, I actually decrease the bids and increase the budget, so I’m just waiting for the sales, basically, but just on the top seller. On the rest of the product, especially on the ones that I need to move, I do the opposite thing. I create one week before I create a retargeting campaign because it’s shown that you need to be seen seven times before someone bought your product. You need to be seen seven times before someone bought your product. So, I tried to show to the same person seven times before Prime to push them to buy the product on Prime.

Bradley Sutton:

You got some buyer psychology going there. I like it. I like it, yeah, excellent.

Gonzalo:

So, for me Prime started one week before.

Bradley Sutton:

What was your most unsuccessful Prime Day? Where sales just stayed the same or even went down, or you made a mistake and something didn’t happen. Do you remember? I remember any. Do you have any bad stories for us from Prime Day?

Gonzalo:

The only one is I think it was the first one that I didn’t realize that I got out of budget on my campaigns. I was selling great. I get out of target. Obviously, my sales drops and I didn’t realize until the next day.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, we’ll call back to you, so stay here Next up, Rolando. Rolando was just on the podcast a few weeks ago and same question for you. We’ve been asking your best Prime Day and, if you can remember, what was the reason for that success?

Rolando:

We’re one of those birds where Prime Day doesn’t mean anything for us. Really, it hasn’t moved the needle. Last year I would say it was probably our best, and that’s because we turned off the PPC. And what we found the year before that so that’d be two years ago was, we were like, oh, let’s do something for Prime Day and we’ll crank up the juice with ads. We saw a lot of clicks, but we didn’t move the needle any further than the previous year. It didn’t move the needle further than our average daily sales. So last year we said no PPC and we didn’t even see a huge drop in terms of our regular run rates or anything like that. It was right around the same, like in just another day. So, for us that’s a victory in that we didn’t waste thousands of dollars for people that are browsing and we just kept selling. So that was, I would say, a win for us to really see the difference one year go cranking out on PPC, one year not cranking out on PPC, and so we learned a lot by doing that.

Bradley Sutton:

And that’s important for everybody here. Don’t think that, hey, I have to do something bold and outrageous on prime day or else I’m a failure. You know like Rolando’s company has sold tens of millions of dollars on Amazon and you just heard from him. You know they’ve tried both and that when you’re selling on Amazon for a while, you can try something one year and try something else. I myself haven’t done. I don’t I don’t do too much on Prime Day outside of just managing my budgets and trying to, leading up to Prime Day, making sure I’m ranked organically where I want to. But that’s super important to know that if you don’t do anything special, that doesn’t mean you’re a complete failure.

Rolando:

You know what you could do. That doesn’t cost any money and something that we are going to be doing this year. We did this three years ago and also for is that around Prime Day, we start going live. It’s great because Amazon does have a lot of stuff going on their social media accounts saying come to our website. You know, check out the live. So being live. Are you talking about Amazon Live. Amazon Live. So, we’ll go live those days. It’ll run on our Amazon store. It’ll actually replay later on the Amazon store. So, we have content. We have our faces on there. We show the product how to use it. We talk about different things. So, exposure wise, it gets people to see oh, these are the people behind the curtain that are part of this company. So, from that standpoint, we look at live as a great day to get new eyeballs without having to spend a ton of money.

Bradley Sutton:

Going back to Gonzalo, how does Helium 10 play a role in what your strategies are Like? What aspects are you using? You know, helium 10, obviously you’re not using Helium 10 to create coupons and things like that or register for deals, because we don’t have that. But on the research side, what are you doing? Or on the um or on the advertising side?

Gonzalo:

First of all, Helium 10 is crucial because I control my all my pay-per-click on Adtomic yeah, it’s crucial for me healing time. And then I have two tools that I love. The first one is market tracker that I regularly is going to take how the sale is going and who are my competitors, and the second one is keyword tracking. Obviously, I’m watching always what is my ranking and what is, how do I doing and how it is impact the pay per click that I’m doing.

Bradley Sutton:

On keyword tracker, are you like putting boost on and then really checking, like your sponsored and organic, like on prime day, making sure you’re not losing your sponsored rank and then, if you do, you  increase your bid? Or is that how you’re using keyword tracker?

Gonzalo:

Yeah, that way, and I also, when I start, when I open a new campaign on a new keyword, I’m start tracking with that, with the rocket, to see if I’m doing some impact or not on that keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, good. Rolando, what are you do?

I mean prime day or Prime Day. What are your go-to Helium 10 tools?

Rolando:

I love, love the dashboard. I love the below the insights, where it tells you all you know, your competitor and all that Below. That is a row that’s super customizable, where you can look at things with your by-product performance or by advertising. And it is for me the thing because we’re really big in the last 18 months is focusing on profitability and we can go line by line, item by item. It’s got everything in so you know your net profit per product and you can pick out the losers, cut them or be like we got to liquidate them or hey, we’ve got more margin on these, these group here. Let’s add some more PPC and see what happens. And now you can work more intelligently than in the past, where maybe the PPC data was over there and the sales data was over here. This combines both of that, so you know immediately these are the losers. They got to do something on them right now.

Bradley Sutton:

Love it. Speaking of the dashboard, something I think a lot of people sleep on at least those with a diamond plan is add competitors to that dashboard, because it’s not just about your product and then set up what we call them insights, that you can consider them alerts. But then it’s especially good, like for Prime Day or around Prime Day, somebody goes out of stock, somebody’s changed their title one of the competitors. Somebody adds a coupon, starts a coupon. Somebody stops a coupon. There’s little things that you can set alerts, that if you don’t have Helium 10, fine, you still got to be looking for these things, but you just got to manually go to all these pages, start, you know, have somebody refresh a screen. But if you’ve got the diamond plan and you guys are using that dashboard that Rolando was talking about, add your competitors and look at, monitor their listings, you can’t see their exact sales. Obviously, Helium 10 is not hacking people’s accounts. But you’ll see estimated sales and things, but you’ll know when they change their image or when they change a coupon or have a sale price. So that’s something important to look at. Last question we’ll, we’ll just stick with Rolando. Then we’ll go back to Gonzalo. This year, prime day, same thing as last year. You’re not going to do, anything special or are you going to do the lives or are you going to do any discounting or any off-amazon promotion? What’s your strategy this year?

Rolando:

So, this year we’re definitely going to do live. Then we’re going to add something we’ve never done before. We’ve never done prime exclusive deals never. I hate giving money away if I have to, but in the, in the spirit of experimentation to see if prime exclusives work for us, we’ve got probably a dozen products that we will be doing some form. One of the things that we literally this morning was one of our meetings. We’ve found an opportunity where a multi-pack unit where we could sell 50 as well as a hundred. Nobody in our category has had anything like that and we know from what our amazon folks are telling us when we talk to them. They’re telling us don’t sleep on multi-packs. They keep telling us that they said that the man for multi packs is going up and up and up and up and up. So, a while back ago we tried just that not on a Prime Day. We added some more multi packs. Guess what? I’m kicking myself because we weren’t doing it five years ago. So, we’re gonna try some exclusives tied with some additional multi packs to see how that works with buyers that are looking for things in volume.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, same question for you, Gonzalo. What’s the plan? What is the plan of attack this year?

Gonzalo:

It’s the same one that I just mentioned. I just started for my main product I’m going to love it and stay calm on it and the one that I need to push a little bit. Actually, today I set the campaign with retargeting and increased bidding one week previous.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, all right, well, guys, thank you so much. Appreciate sharing your knowledge with us today. All right, Carrie, how many Prime days under your belt?

Carrie:

I’ve been selling since 2016. So, I guess eight.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you have? I know you’ve got a lot of horror stories, just in general crazy things, and I’m going to save some of those for future podcasts with you. Yeah, but do you have? Let’s start on the opposite side. Do you have any horror stories that specifically are related to Prime Day? or at least just maybe a prime day that just didn’t work out for you.

Carrie:

No, what’s really cool about our sales is, over the years, they’ve just incrementally increased, and so every prime day has been better than the last, and so it’s not been like, oh, one day we did like 200,000 in sales or something, but it’s like we definitely did a substantial amount more than the year before and the year before. And so, year over year, we’re increasing.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s good. So, you never had one where you accidentally did too big of a discount or you thought you were qualified for a deal and you ended up not doing it. It’s been pretty much as planned.

Carrie:

Yeah, for Prime Day. I mean, I have accidentally done a really big discount on a coupon where it was like something that was supposed to be $15 was like $1.99. And I was like, wow, it’s selling really well. So off of prime day I’ve done that, you know.

Bradley Sutton:

But not for prime day. And then do you remember what year was your best prime day Last year? Have one that sticks out.

Carrie:

Last year was the biggest yeah cause every year it’s gotten bigger. It was about 16,000. I remember our first one. It was like we were selling about $400 a day and I remember it went up to like a thousand dollars that day and we were like, oh my gosh, and so now we’ve gone quite a bit more for that day.

Bradley Sutton:

So, you did $16,000 on one day. Yeah, on Prime Day last year. And what would you attribute that to? Did you do something different or a special campaign just really worked out, or what happened?

Carrie:

We do coupons and so not only in the days leading up to Prime Day but also after, we still get a good amount of sales well over our normal average, and so I think that’s a big part of it. But, yeah, we offer coupons and like the discounts, not Prime Day exclusive discounts or anything like that, we just do our normal discounts and that’s how we do it and it works out really well. And you always have to make sure your listing is optimized and that you’ve got good product reviews, and so you know if you’re, if your listing isn’t optimized, you’re going to want to turn off the ads on those particular products or if you have kind of bad reviews. But you’re, you’re heroes. You know if you do some, some discounts on there and you have it fully optimized, it’s, it’s definitely worth it.

Bradley Sutton:

Now speaking of Helium 10, we’re going share her screen now and I want you to actually show, step-by-step, a couple strategies that you think are important for a seller to do leading up to Prime Days.

Carrie:

So, this is one of my favorite tools. I think Abe was mentioning this because I know he really likes this tool too. You can use this in a lot of different ways, but basically, you’re going to do what I do is I just do a single ASIN search on a main competitor. In this situation, because I’m looking at Prime Day and I wanted to give you an example of you know some, a way to find some good Prime Day keywords. There’s this, this vacuum mop that I have actually purchased and I know a lot of people have purchased this particular mop for Prime Day because it’s usually a pretty good deal and so I wanted to just show you how you can find kind of Prime Day specific keywords. So, I took this ASIN and did a reverse ASIN search here, and what I love about this Cerebro tool is the show historical trend tool. Now, when you go to show historical trend, it’s going to give you 24 months of data, so you can go all the way back 24 months and you can see where an ASIN was ranked organically and for their sponsored. You can also see the search volume history, and so it’s really, really helpful so you can go back to the last prime day and the prime day before. It’s just kind of just right there. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to click on this July 2023, because that was when our prime day was last year, and then I’m going to go down and click apply filters, because I want to just look at this month specifically, because I’m looking for prime day specific keywords. Okay, so, um, when, when I’m in this historical trend, if I go down here, you’re going to see basically all of the keywords that this particular product was ranking for organically and sponsored. You can see their actual rank here. But I want to look for you can filter this down and I usually like to look at phrases containing. So, one of the phrases I like to look at is prime and if I hit apply filters, then if I go down here, I can see all of the kind of Prime Day keywords.

Carrie:

Now, this particular product they’re ranking. They’re one of the top sellers, I know, on Prime Day, but their organic rank on these major keywords is, you know, 230. They’re in the 200s. They’re way behind. So, they’re not even really, they hadn’t even advertised on these keywords, probably because they didn’t really know they existed. So now, if you can go back, you can find the historical keywords. You can create campaigns with these specific keywords in them and you can start targeting those. I mean they’ve only they only look targeted this one. It was a Prime Day vacuums 1100 search volume, totally missing out on 8500 in search volume. You can also see here this is actually our up-to-date information. It’s showing the trending of these keywords going up, up, up. Now a lot of times you’ll see these keywords and it’s like you know a month before it’s going to be like oh there’s, you know, 200 searches or whatever. So, this gives you the information of how much they’re increasing and so you can even start these campaigns, you know, a month early, two months early, to just start getting yourself, you know, ranked on those keywords. And you can also leave these campaigns going all year round, kind of as an evergreen campaign, to just make sure that you’re at the top of those searches and so that they have all their Christmas gifts you know a bunch of Christmas gifts for their family in December. You can you know search phrases containing gifts or anything that really pertains to your particular product. During Prime Day you can start searching for those terms you can look at. You know some of your biggest competitors, like the biggest competitor, and you can see what kind of keywords they’re. You know they’re ranking for but maybe not really capitalizing on, and so this is just a really, I think, amazing tool to get historical data and utilize it for this particular Prime Day.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Thank you for sharing that with us. I mean, you can use this what she was talking about for almost any period of the year, but obviously we’re talking about Prime Day now, so that’s why it’s especially beneficial for you guys to use that leading up into prime days.

Carrie:

We have a prime day checklist that we put together that has amazing information from. We have Destiny Wishon from Better Media. She gave some PPC tips. We have Emma from Marketing by Emma, and she gave a lot of really incredible tips for optimizing your listing. These things are it’s not too late to do them. So, there’s a lot of stuff on this list that you could really implement. Implement now, even if you feel like you’re kind of like behind in the game. These are tips also you can use year-round, because it’s really good optimization. So, make sure you download that, check it out, do as much as you can before Prime Day, and it’s going to help your conversion, even if you’re just doing a small discount it will help your conversion.

Bradley Sutton:

So h10.me/primelist, h10.me/primelist. And then we will go ahead and invite we up, Huy, how’s it going?

Huy:

Hey, how’s it going, Bradley.

Bradley Sutton:

Pretty good, pretty good. Now what about you, we? How many prime days do you think you’ve experienced in your lifetime, your amazon lifetime?

Huy:

Since the beginning, so kind of lost count, I don’t know, probably plus five years. What year did it actually start, Bradley?

Bradley Sutton:

I don’t even remember. It was before.

And then, plus, there’s two prime days a year. But let’s just say you have a lot of prime days under your belt. Now, something I’ve been asking the different guests is what was the best prime day you had where, just like, sales were way more than normal and way more than other primaries? Do you remember what year that was or what the numbers were kind of?

Huy:

I don’t remember the year, but it was definitely before COVID One of the things that it might’ve been the second year that prime day had been announced, right, and this was prior to them doing it only kind of like once a year, right, cause then they switched off to doing it twice a year, probably the biggest opportunity, the biggest win that we had. It wasn’t intentional, it was actually when we got mentioned on. They used to do a live stream during Prime Day, right, Amazon did a live stream. They actually mentioned one of our products and we’ve never sold more products in one day than on that day. So, our product got mentioned in the live stream. We started seeing sales climb up. All the units we had allocated to that promotion were sold out pretty quick, but fortunately we were watching it and we were able to go in and adjust the quantities that we wanted to put in that promotion. So that’s probably one of the things is like you definitely want to be making sure that you’re looking at how many units you have available in that promotion and if you have the opportunity to adjust it just based on the demand. You know that was a huge win for us, I think. On the other end, though, Bradley

Bradley Sutton:

Disaster, any disasters or crazy things that happen.

Huy:

Not necessarily the disasters, but just to kind of put a point to that other one where it’s like, if you put too many quantity in there, it’s kind of like a psychological game as well, right? So, when there’s a lot of deals that are going on, customers are looking and then they’ve got that progress bar where it says, hey, how many people have claimed this deal. So, if you put in too many units up in the beginning and then you’re stuck between that below 10% claim number, people are not as excited to go out and claim those deals. So, I think that finding that balance of having it over 50% claimed people looking at it and then having that FOMO where they’re going to go out and jump on it. So, I think, in terms of disasters, I’m going to be a hundred percent honest, we haven’t been doing a lot of prime, uh, prime day, actual deals, lightning deals, and the reason why is the past couple of yeah, past couple of times it has not been effective. You know like, yeah, it’s uh cost. What does it cost? $1,000 to run a deal, even if you have it on the day. What we used to do is we used to put all of our items available and put it into the promotion and then we, when they tell us the schedule, then we cancel the ones out that weren’t actually on Prime Day or kind of you know, within that range, because they were putting some of us, like you know, the week before Prime Day or just a couple days after that was already not effective.

But I think that because Amazon switched to allowing everybody to provide that Prime exclusive discount you know, like not having an actual deal but just kind of marking it off and then getting that Prime Day exclusive badge that has actually probably changed the most for us. We found that to be most effective. There’s no cost to do it and I think that everybody’s got that strategy where there’s just too much inventory of Prime Day deals out there that when Amazon expanded it out beyond just those lightning deals, everybody just started looking outside as well.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m happy you mentioned that because I think that people need to understand that. Once I’ve said it five times today is that prime day success is not contingent on, he who does the most deals or he who spends the most money in in PPC, or you have to do prime exclusive discounts or you have to do lightning deals. No, you can have success on prime day in a lot of different ways. For some people, that is what’s needed, or for some people, other people, it’s doing everything like. Like Abe mentioned that crazy experience of somebody who went from $15,000 to $1 million on one product on Prime Day because they went all in on something that probably is not duplicatable. But again, there’s different ways to have success on Prime Day. Again, Gonzalo, Rolando, Huy, and then Abe and Abdul, thank you, and Carrie, of course. Thank you so much for joining us and we’ll see you guys’ next week. Bye-bye now.

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• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business. 
• Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
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