Preparing for Prime Big Deals Days: Amazon’s Fall Deal Event
It’s been a couple months since Amazon Prime Day 2024 came to a close, with $14.2 billion spent during the Prime Day event, an 11% jump from last year’s $12.7 billion total thanks to special deals and discounts.
The big question is: Is there going to be another Prime Big Deals Day in October?
The simple answer is: Yes! Amazon has confirmed they’ll bring back Prime Big Deals Day and just announced that the event will be held Oct. 8-9.
This event is an ideal opportunity to prepare for the holiday season on Amazon. It’s also a great time to optimize your brand’s presence on Amazon by evaluating all of your creative efforts, promotion strategies, review generation, and chargeback management.
Is your brand ready to cash in on what could be one of the biggest shopping holidays of the year? From buttoned-up operations to eye-catching creative and savvy advertising tactics, we’ve compiled the ultimate checklist to ensure you are Prime Day ready.
What is Prime Big Deals Day?
Prime Big Deals Day is a shopping event exclusive to Amazon Prime members. It offers members the opportunity to enjoy significant discounts on a wide range of products, from electronics and home goods to fashion and toys. The shopping event is highly focused on giving Prime members advanced access to holiday savings (including Halloween items) while also providing great deals on everyday essentials like batteries, pet supplies, and more.
In their recent announcement, Amazon also noted that “new deals will drop as often as every five minutes during select periods throughout the event so members can shop early and often to discover new deals and fresh savings.”
Prime Big Deal Days presents a fantastic opportunity for Amazon sellers to significantly boost their sales and visibility. The event attracts a large number of Prime members, increasing potential customer traffic. Additionally, Amazon often highlights deals and promotions during this time, providing sellers with enhanced visibility. This can lead to a surge in sales and improved brand awareness.
This year, Prime Big Deal Days will take place in 19 countries including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, the U.S., and the UK.
When Will Prime Big Deals Day 2024 Happen?
Amazon just announced that Prime Big Deal Days is returning on October 8th and 9th to kick off the holiday shopping season with exclusive savings for Prime members.
“We’re gearing up for another exciting holiday shopping season, filled with unbeatable deals on beloved brands, seasonal products, and popular gifts available exclusively for Prime members. Exclusive savings events like Prime Big Deal Days combined with unlimited fast, free delivery of 300+ million products across more than 35 categories year-round put Prime in a class of its own and make membership a better value than ever before. Whether Prime members are hoping to cross items off their gift lists early, looking forward to hosting joyful gatherings, or scoring something special for themselves, Prime Big Deal Days is here for all their holiday needs and more.”
Jamil Ghani Vice President of Prime Worldwide
How to Prepare for Prime Big Deals Days Ahead of October
Here is a valuable list of tips to help you prepare for the upcoming Prime Day holiday in October.
1. Review historical performance
One of the best things a seller can do after Prime Day is pay attention to actions. Dig up analytics and demographics from your July Prime Day event and check to see if there was a noticeable increase in things such as new customers or new search items. The goal is to identify your successes and failures and make the changes necessary (or mimic the actions that produced positive results for your brand) to facilitate future growth.
2. Choose your products wisely & check your inventory levels
Did you go out of stock during this year’s event? Did you have too much inventory on-hand? Take a look at historical performance so you can better prepare for October and other large shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. You’ll also want to check in with Prime Day experts (like Tinuiti) to ensure you are meeting shipping and other important deal submission deadlines.
It’s also important to take note that Amazon has just introduced Multi-Channel Distribution (MCD) as a new feature for Amazon Warehousing and Distribution (AWD), helping sellers streamline their supply chain by using a single inventory pool for all sales channels. This eliminates the need to pre-allocate inventory, reducing stock requirements by an average of 20% and preventing stockouts, leading to increased sales. Additionally, MCD now offers custom labeling, allowing sellers to distribute products in bulk across various sales channels, including marketplaces, wholesalers, distributors, and physical stores.
Additionally, make sure your products meet Amazon’s product and fulfillment eligibility criteria:
- Condition: Products must be new.
- Ratings and reviews: Products should have a rating of at least 4 stars or no rating at all.
- Pricing: Discounts must be at least 20% off the non-member, non-promotional price. The discounted price must be at least 15% lower than the list price (reference price or Was price).
- Compliance: The product must comply with Amazon’s customer product reviews and pricing policies.
- Restrictions: Restricted products are not allowed.
- Products must be eligible for Prime shipping in all regions within the country.
- For Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP), sellers need to maintain a Late Shipment Rate under 4%; an order defect rate of less than 1%; a pre-fulfillment cancellation rate of 0.5% or lower for the month preceding the deal; and the disbursement reserve policy must be set to 7 days or more after delivery. Amazon also requires SFP items to be shipped for free.
3. Optimize your product listings
Optimizing your Amazon product detail pages for Prime Big Deals Day is essential for maximizing sales. By conducting thorough keyword research and strategically incorporating relevant terms into your titles, bullet points, and back-end keywords, you can improve your search visibility.
High-quality product images and engaging A+ Content, including compelling visuals and informative text, can also enhance the customer experience and drive conversions. Last but not least, optimizing your product pages for conversion by using clear calls to action, offering product bundles, and prominently displaying positive reviews can encourage customers to make a purchase. By implementing these strategies well in advance of Prime Big Deals Day, you can increase your chances of ranking higher in search results and achieving significant sales growth.
4. Generate new reviews from July Prime Day shoppers
Amazon product reviews are vital for several reasons. They build trust and credibility by showcasing the experiences of previous buyers, helping potential customers make informed decisions. Reviews also provide valuable feedback to sellers and manufacturers, aiding product improvement. Amazon’s search algorithm considers the number and quality of reviews when determining search rankings, enhancing a product’s visibility. Positive reviews contribute to higher conversion rates, giving products a competitive edge. The Amazon Request a Review button is a great way to generate a product review and seller feedback.
Keeping a high seller feedback rating is also important to participate in future Prime Days. To be eligible for Prime Day deals, sellers must have at least 4-star seller feedback ratings or no ratings.
5. Use a variety of promotional strategies
There are many ways to advertise your products on Amazon’s big shopping days. One of the most effective tools is using Amazon Sponsored Products. With the significant increase in site traffic that Amazon expects over Prime Big Deals Day, it is imperative to leverage Sponsored Products as a way to maximize your ASINs’ discoverability against high performing searches.
To further increase your product’s visibility, consider the following promotional strategies:
Increase your Sponsored Product spend – During Prime Day 2024, Tinuiti clients experienced an average of 20% increase in Sponsored Product cost-per-click (CPC). Ensure your campaigns increase bid caps on high converting keywords, and increase daily budgets, to maintain campaign delivery throughout the event.
Consider retargeting – By implementing retargeting and upper funnel awareness-building tactics during the lead-out period of Prime Big Deal Days, brands can effectively capitalize on the increased customer engagement and drive new-to-brand customers. This approach helps to expand market share, build brand recognition, and establish a lasting presence on Amazon.
Boost product and brand awareness on social media – Social media is a powerful tool to build your brand and product awareness. Utilize social media platforms and other online channels to promote your products and direct customers to your Amazon listings. Along with social media, we recommend incorporating influencers into your strategy to tap into new audiences who trust their product endorsements.
Create an Amazon store subcategory page – Amazon Stores is a free self-service product that allows brand owners to design and create multi-page stores to showcase their brands, products, and value proposition on Amazon.
Employ Amazon DSP – Amazon DSP also known as the Amazon Demand-Side Platform — enables advertisers to programmatically buy video, audio, and display ad placements, using available data to target consumers on and off of Amazon. Advertising to the audiences available within the Amazon Demand-Side Platform (DSP) can help increase your brand awareness both on and off Amazon, reaching new and existing audiences.
Leverage Amazon Posts – Amazon Posts is a program available to brand-registered sellers that allows them to share brand and product-related content in a “feed” that resembles other social media platforms. By using Amazon Posts, brands can duplicate what they’re already doing on Instagram and similar image-based platforms directly within the Amazon Marketplace.
6. Offer multiple types of deals to customers
Deals and discounts are the driving force behind Prime Big Deals Day, attracting shoppers with enticing offers. To maximize your success, consider offering a variety of deal types to cater to different customer preferences.
Prime Exclusive Discounts
These are discounts exclusively available to Amazon Prime members. Considering Prime has over 200 million global subscribers, this is a way to provide added value to a huge market and reach customers who default to shopping on Amazon. This leads to repeat purchases and increased customer loyalty for this audience segment.
Coupons
Amazon’s coupons are digital vouchers that can be applied at checkout to reduce the price of a product. This provides brands with flexibility in providing discounts on specific items or categories. On top of this you can easily distribute coupons through email, social media, or product pages and target them to specific customer segments.
Lightning Deals
Lightning deals are a time-limited promotion where a product is sold at a discounted price until the deal expires or stock runs out. This promotes increased visibility of your product, since it will be featured on Amazon’s deals page. It can also boost sales by creating more urgency for shoppers, which makes it a great option for clearing overstocked items out of your inventory.
Other Promotions
Amazon also offers a wide range of other promotional offers, such as buy-one-get-one-free deals, free shipping, or limited-time bundles. These will help you create excitement and urgency among customers and increase average order value and drive sales. You can also mix and match deal types, ensuring you give customers the most compelling offer possible.
By offering a combination of these deal types, you can cater to different customer preferences, increase customer engagement, and drive higher sales during Prime Big Deals Day.
7. Design holiday and savings-focused creative assets
Numerous creative strategies are at your disposal to enhance your brand assets on Amazon. These strategies include optimizing your Amazon stores, allocating resources to craft distinctive content for your Amazon Posts, prioritizing the selection and promotion of product photography with a holiday deals focus, and, naturally, ensuring the utilization of A+ content throughout your product detail pages and stores.
8. Think about chargeback and return management
From packaging problems to technical errors in transmitting Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), Amazon will charge vendors for almost anything they can. Amazon Chargebacks are operational fees a vendor will see as deductions from their Amazon remittance checks. Amazon vendors should familiarize themselves on how these fees impact their account and what steps they can take to avoid deductions.
Earlier this year, Amazon announced that they are now flagging high-return items on product detail pages to warn customers prior to purchase. This new badge will encourage customers to dive a little deeper into product research and reviews before purchasing, ensuring they are receiving the exact item they want/need.
Learn More
By following these steps and leveraging the insights provided, you can position your brand for a successful Prime Big Deals Day. Remember, the key is to prepare well in advance, optimize your offerings, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. With the right strategy, you can capitalize on this lucrative shopping event and achieve significant sales growth for your Amazon business.
Interested in learning more? Contact us today for more information.
You Might Be Interested In
