As a highly anticipated summer promotion, Amazon Prime Day will continue to provide discounts and special offers to hundreds of millions of Prime members for 30 hours (the duration may be increased this year).
Last year, Amazon Prime Day was its biggest promotion since the fall holiday season, with sales exceeding 2016 and up 60% year-over-year. Amazon sellers saw profits increase 58% and sales increase 92%.
Relevant analysis predicts that this year's Prime Day will set a new record. Whether you are an Amazon seller or not, participating in Prime Day is a wise choice. Even Best Buy, the world's largest home appliance and electronics retailer, uses Prime Day to advertise.
During the busy preparation period and the period of order surge, sellers are often prone to making mistakes due to lack of experience, which affects their sales progress. This year is the third year of Prime Day, and previous events have provided sellers with many experiences worth learning from. Here is a summary of some common mistakes sellers make.
1. Lack of public opinion
Most sellers mistakenly believe that only logistics and product inventory are crucial in carrying out Prime Day work, thus giving up the important position of public opinion. After Amazon officially announced the date of Prime Day, it immediately sparked heated discussions online (in fact, when speculation about the date of Prime Day appeared online, it attracted a lot of attention). It has been proven that on big promotion days like Prime Day, appropriate publicity can boost sellers’ sales. Here are a few effective methods:
Public opinion attracts customers
Lead customers through social media blog posts, ads or other media channels to inform them how they can participate in Prime Day and benefit from huge discounts. In particular, some non-members may not realize what benefits they can enjoy by becoming a Prime member (last year's event added a large number of new Prime users), who will become one of the main target customers.
Topic tracking customers
If you have your own Twitter or Instagram account, you can actively follow users who have participated in discussions on related topics such as #PrimeDay, #PrimeDay18, and #PrimeDay2018, and share inside information about the promotion and discounts on your own products with these potential customers. There is huge purchasing potential among these social media users.
Control reviews to attract customers
Product reviews are something that customers highly value. Surveys show that 85% of consumers believe product reviews are as trustworthy as personal recommendations. However, getting product reviews from buyers is only the first step. The survey shows that 44.6% of consumers said that if they receive a reply to their comments from a merchant (most people hope that the merchant will reply to their comments within a week), they will have a more favorable impression of the brand and give priority to purchasing.
Therefore, in addition to a plan to convert sales traffic into reviews, sellers also need a means to monitor product reviews, especially neutral negative reviews, because customers tend to only buy products with a positive rating of 4-4.5 stars or above. Sellers can consider using third-party review control software such as ShippingEasy that complies with the relevant rules and requirements of the Amazon seller platform.
2. Lack of customer communication
Even though Amazon has strict rules regarding communication between sellers and customers on its platform, that doesn’t mean communication isn’t important to successful Prime Day sales. Instead, effective customer communication will be:
Promotional product album
Although sellers cannot send emails directly to previous Amazon customers, you can promote Prime Day specials to the rest of your subscribers to ensure that they are familiar with the promotional categories and discounts and become their first choice for similar products.
Social media advertising
Sellers can also consider placing advertisements on social media to communicate with consumers indirectly, so that they will have great interest in the products and offers in the advertisements and make purchases on their own initiative.
third-party customers
Sellers can contact their third-party customers on other platforms and invite them to participate in the Prime Day promotion together. Whether it is a phone call, email or message, sellers must ensure that their product information, discount levels and purchase channels are included in order to maintain a good business relationship while attracting customers.
3. Lack of logistics optimization
During Prime Day, complex and inefficient order processing and delayed logistics transportation can easily cause huge sales problems. Here are some things to watch out for before Prime Day:
Automatically order downloads
Relying on copy-and-paste to record and track orders will cause huge errors during Prime Day. Using professional software to confirm order information, send emails and confirm tracking operations will not only reduce this error but also improve work efficiency. Sellers will welcome a large number of new users on Prime Day and ensure that they enjoy the best ordering experience.
Rate comparison and save options
An efficient and professional logistics software will provide sellers with freight rate comparisons and payment channel options so that the customers served by the sellers can make quick and correct choices. Especially during Prime Day, member users will enjoy the privilege of free shipping (shipped within 48 hours). It is imperative to maintain this demand without sellers losing money on shipping costs.
Since a single product may be sold repeatedly on Prime Day, the save option becomes a shortcut for sellers to save the optimal settings for package packaging, avoiding time wasted on manual selection and reducing the possibility of incorrect selection during order surges.
Transport rules
One of the best ways to optimize your shipping process is to use shipping software to create shipping rules that automate the process for you.
Sellers can set Prime orders to automatically add a priority processing flag during Prime Day so that sellers can prioritize and ship out the orders in a timely manner, because any delay in processing Prime orders will put merchants in trouble.
In addition, Amazon requires sellers to include a packing slip with their shipments. They also have strict requirements for return policies, so sellers are advised to include these policy contents on the packing slip, which are not accepted by other platforms.
Fortunately, sellers can save a lot of time during Prime by leveraging shipping rules to create customized packing slip templates for Amazon orders and ensure they are accurate and consistent with Amazon’s requirements.
By avoiding spending time on these mistakes, sellers can go all-in on Prime Day and score a huge win during the eCommerce slow season.
