Could Amazon Prime Day 2017 actually be Amazon Prime Week 2017?
Monday, June 26, 2017Lauren Macdonald
Amazon Prime Day is an annual sales event by
Amazon.com that some say offers big enough deals to rival Black Friday.
The event first started in 2015, when the online retail giant marked two decades since the day it first opened, and the sale was so successful that Amazon decided to make it an annual affair.
The exact date for this year’s Prime Day hasn’t been announced yet, but it’s predicted that it will be sometime between July 10
th and July 16
th, with much speculation that it will fall on
Tuesday July 11th, 2017.
Unlike past years when it was a 24-hour event, this year Prime Day will run for 30 hours (from 6:00 PM to midnight PDT on the day before Prime Day, plus the 24 hours of Prime Day itself). Essentially, we’re talking about a day and a half of deals and discounts for Amazon Prime members.
Even more exciting, Amazon has also alluded to the possibility of a
“Prime Day Week” this year, which might mean they have plans to promote more than just a single day of deals.
Why Prime Day is a big deal for brands selling on Amazon:
- Order volume on Prime Day is huge compared with orders on other days. Not only that, but Prime Day sales in 2016 were much higher than in 2015, and projections estimate that 2017 will be the biggest Prime Day yet
- At least 50 percent of the orders placed on Prime Day 2016 were from third-party sellers (i.e. brands that sell on the Seller Central platform), meaning that Prime Day is not just a day for Amazon to hawk its own inventory
- Finally, Amazon Prime Day is nicely timed in the middle of summer when retail sales are generally slow, making it a nice opportunity for brands that need a mid-year sales boost to smooth out their cash flow
“What if I wasn’t invited to run official Prime Day deals?”
Every year Amazon handpicks some Sellers to run official Prime Day deals. The sellers chosen for 2017 would have received messages from Amazon sometime in May, inviting them to submit Lightning Deals for Prime Day. To decide which deals to actually run, Amazon would then look for Sellers who submit items with discounts of 20 percent or more, enough quantity to last the duration of the Lightning Deal, products that have a 3-star rating or higher, and deals that have been submitted through Seller Central.
But, if you sell on Amazon and didn’t receive one of these invitations from Amazon, that doesn’t mean that you can’t reap the benefits of Amazon Prime Day as well. You can still take advantage of a halo effect generated by the buzz of Prime Day. Since it is such a highly publicized event, people will be logging into Amazon by the masses to check out deals and purchase things they’ve had their eyes on for a while. Make sure your products are easily searchable, and if possible, discounted, to take advantage of the additional traffic.
Our top 3 suggestions for Amazon Sellers as they prepare for Prime Day 2017:
- Inventory Planning
- Review your current assortment of products and choose which ones you want to promote, and then STOCK UP!
- Running out of stock is a guaranteed way to miss out on the boosted traffic and open wallets of Prime Day.
- Amazon suggests having your inventory arrive at its fulfillment centers before June 20th, so if you haven’t got it there already, today is better than tomorrow!
- Think ‘Deals, Deals, Deals’
- Even if Amazon isn’t choosing your products for their Lightning Deals, there is nothing stopping you from catching the attention of shoppers on Prime Day with some attractive discounts on your products.
- If a customer has a product saved in their Wish List or Shopping Cart and the price of that product changes, they will get a notification at checkout, so take advantage of this feature! Simply changing the price of some of your products may prompt customers to place an order they’d been holding off on.
- Note: Amazon does not allow qualifiers like “Prime Day Deal” or “On Sale” in the titles of product listings, so be sure to avoid those.
- Ensure your important business systems are communicating!
- As many of you probably know from days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there’s nothing worse than disconnected business systems on busy sales days when orders are coming in faster than ever.
- The good news is you can integrate your business systems so that orders, inventory, shipping/tracking information, and more, will be fully automated and updated in ALL of your important business systems, in real-time.
This can save you a massive amount of order-entry related headaches on Prime Day and throughout the year. To find out how to integrate Amazon with your business systems.