Tips and Strategies for Sellers to Prepare for Amazon Prime Day

Introduction

Amazon Prime Day season is upon us again, and ambitious e-commerce sellers should keep this on their radars.

For those who’ve been selling on Amazon for a while (and even for relatively new ones), Prime Day is a huge opportunity to increase your brand’s presence and maximize your customers.

Are you interested in learning what Prime Day can do for you? If so, look below at the most important things you must know to prepare for this yearly event.

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Megan Thee Stallion Announces Prime Day

In an exciting development for Amazon Prime Day 2024, Grammy-winning artist Megan Thee Stallion has officially announced the dates for this year’s event as July 16th-17th. The popular rapper’s involvement in promoting Prime Day shows Amazon’s continued commitment to reaching a broader and more diverse audience.

Megan Thee Stallion’s announcement—shared through various social media platforms and Amazon’s marketing channels—has generated significant buzz around the upcoming shopping event. Amazon sellers can expect that her participation will likely attract increased attention from younger consumers and potentially bring in new Prime members.

Additionally, sellers should factor this announcement into their Prime Day strategies, potentially considering how to appeal to younger demographics that will most likely be influenced by Megan Thee Stallion’s endorsement of the event.

This is a good reminder to always stay both flexible and responsive to Amazon’s marketing initiatives, which can help maximize the benefits of participating in Prime Day.

What Is Amazon Prime Day?

A yearly shopping event only available for Amazon Prime members, Amazon Prime Day is a two-day event where Amazon and its third-party sellers offer huge discounts on various items in many product categories.

Prime Day is not only great for customers, but it’s also a huge benefit for brands. This is because the massive deals during this period attracted more than the usual number of customers to Amazon, boosting sales for many third-party brands. These particular Amazon shoppers can then become repeat customers of your brand if your customer service and overall brand impress them enough; as an aside, this is a great reason to improve your Amazon storefront and other parts of your brand.

Even though e-commerce is changing year after year, Amazon Prime Day is always a massive opportunity for all struggling or successful sellers to potentially increase Amazon sales.

When Is the Next Prime Day?

Amazon Prime Day 2024 is expected to occur from July 16th-17th. 

For reference, last year’s Prime Day took place on Tuesday, July 11th-12th, while the year before that (2022) was scheduled on July 12th-13th.

Before Prime Day begins, ensure your brand is clean, presentable, and ready to impress the many new customers flocking to Amazon during this summer event.

How to Prepare for Prime Day

To help fully prepare for Prime Day and increase your quarterly profits by a considerable amount, you’ll need to ensure that your brand is ready to go by doing the following:

1. Offer Customers Multiple Ways to Save

A great way to convince potential customers to purchase your products during Amazon Prime Day is to create many enticing deals, discounts, and promotions for a variety—if not all—of your listings.

Remember that some third-party sellers do not run Amazon ads at all and still see a rise in sales. This is mainly due to increased traffic. However, while it’s still possible to get more sales during Prime Day, it’s a good idea to ensure this is the case by offering discounts and the like, such as:

Prime Day Event Deals

Amazon sees a huge increase in customers during Prime Day because these customers want—and are expecting—deals. Offering some can go a long way toward securing two profitable days.

Please remember that interested sellers must submit deals for Prime Day week by May 3rd, 2024.

They can specifically do this by going to the ‘Deals’ section in Amazon Seller Central and looking at what is available to be submitted during this event.

However, running deals on your items during this period will be more expensive than usual. Amazon believes the increased traffic to third-party brands during this event more than makes up for the slight bump in seller fees.

Lightning deals, for instance, will cost more than usual, but they can still be worth it, depending on your product. If you’ve had your item listed for a long time or have a high conversion rate, it’s worth it.

However, if your product is new and hasn’t had many sales (or if your PPC budget is low), it may be a good idea to hold off on a Lightning Deal and offer a Prime Exclusive Discount or coupon.

Prime Exclusive Discount

As mentioned above, Lightning Deals are just one of many deals you can offer on Amazon during Prime Day. Many sellers also opt for a Prime Exclusive Discount.

This discount is offered exclusively to Amazon Prime customers. It shows a discounted price with the regular, more expensive price crossed out and a percentage of how much those customers can save.

To set up a Prime Exclusive Discount, go to the ‘Advertising’ tab in Amazon Seller Central and click ‘Prime Exclusive Discounts.’

You’ll usually be able to set these particular discounts during the week of Prime Day, so make sure you continually check back to Seller Central to ensure you don’t miss your chance.

Coupons

A coupon is one of the best ways to let customers know you’re offering low prices. An Amazon coupon will appear as a green tag in the area around the list price on your product detail page.

Create a Promotion

Within Seller Central, Amazon allows sellers like you to create various promotions, including “buy one, get one free” and “buy one, get 50% off.” You’ll also be able to create social media promo codes you can share with your audience or an Amazon influencer. If you choose this option, you’ll be sent a custom marketing page link to give to potential customers.

2. Order Inventory

Start ordering as soon as possible to ensure that you have enough inventory for Prime Day. That said, negotiate with your Amazon supplier or manufacturer to work out a timeline that works best for everyone.

Even though Amazon has not yet stated when Prime Day will begin, it’s most likely (based on previous years) that the event will occur sometime in mid-July. Ensure that your inventory is ready to go before then to put yourself and your brand in the best possible position.

Additionally, if you fulfill your orders through Amazon FBA, you must ensure that your FBA capacity limits can handle the extra supply you’ll order.

If your capacity limits are too low, you’ll need to increase your sell-through rate while reducing excess inventory since both can significantly affect Amazon’s inventory limits.

3. Create FBM Offers

Suppose your current Amazon inventory capacity is too low for the amount of inventory you’re purchasing for Prime Day. In that case, you should utilize Amazon FBM offers on your affected listings to offer deals and effectively meet the increased customer demand.

Additionally, Amazon sellers can offer FBA and FBM fulfillment methods under just one ASIN. For example, when adding an FBM option, simply:

1. Click on ‘Add Products’ in Seller Central
2. Then, enter your ASIN
3. Click ‘Sell this product.’
4. Input a new SKU to identify the new FBM offer
5. Select ‘I will ship this item myself’ as the fulfillment method

Also, if your FBA inventory runs out, the FBM offer you created will come into effect via the Buy Box as long as you have available FBM inventory.

4. Optimize Your Listings

Listing optimization should also play a massive role in Prime Day and any major e-commerce event or sale. Even though Amazon customers most commonly talk about discounted prices, product listing optimization can significantly affect whether or not a customer buys your product.

To effectively optimize your Amazon listing, you’ll need to:

• Optimize your title, bullet points, images, and descriptions and ensure they’re up-to-date, enhanced with SEO keywords, and highly compelling. If this sounds difficult or confusing, never fear! Just use Helium 10’s Listing Builder tool, which will help lighten the load.
• Split-test your listing’s A+ content using Amazon’s handy tool. This will boost your listing’s conversion potential.
• Increase your review count through customer service and asking for reviews. Since this method does not always guarantee the reviews you need, we recommend using Helium 10’s Seller Assistant tool, which boosts the probability of receiving reviews.

Focusing on these three crucial product listing aspects now rather than right before the big Prime Day sale will help ensure that at least one of your items becomes one of the top products on Amazon (which increases sales even more)!

5. Boost Your Marketing Strategy

Help give your potential Amazon customers a gentle push in the right direction so they can find your compelling listings on Prime Day with a new and improved marketing strategy.

But what does a great marketing strategy look like? Check out three tips below that many highly lucrative Amazon brands use:

• Utilize PPC campaigns and bid aggressively for your product’s most important SEO keywords. This will help quickly increase your product’s organic ranking, enabling your item to be seen by more shoppers. PPC campaigns you should consider focusing on include Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Brands Video, and Sponsored Display ads.
• Run ads on other platforms besides Amazon. While this may seem counterintuitive, it can drive more external traffic to your Amazon brand during Prime Day (or any other time of year). We recommend trying out Google and Facebook ads and branching off from there.
• Use social media platforms to boost your sales numbers. If you have a solid social media presence on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, or elsewhere, you can capture an entirely new audience that will buy your products. This is usually done through posts, Instagram stories (Instagram only), and short videos that let your social media audience know whenever a huge sale occurs! As a bonus, any additional content you don’t use (or recycle) can also be used on Amazon Posts.

Conclusion

Amazon Prime Day is a great chance to increase your brand’s visibility and sales, and it can also work for non-active e-commerce sellers. However, utilizing an effective advertising strategy is important to make the most of Prime Day. When you take the time to create a strategy that encourages customer loyalty rather than just offering discounts, you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish.