The holiday shopping season is quickly approaching, presenting a significant opportunity for ecommerce sellers. Is your Amazon/ Walmart business ready to capitalize on it? Here are 6 steps to prepare your brand for Holiday Season:
Optimize Your Listings
Know your Market Share
Create Holiday deals
Prepare potential Delays & Holiday Returns
Create a Media Plan & PPC Strategy
2024 Holiday Peak FBA Fulfilment Fee Update
1. Optimize Your Listings :
Yes, this might sound the basic thing to do. But prepare for the holiday traffic by optimizing your listings for both search and conversions, particularly focusing on holiday-related terms. This includes updating product images, adding videos, improving reviews and ratings, and incorporating keywords like "gift" and "Christmas" into product descriptions.
2. Know your Market :
Understand your market share: Amazon sellers need to fully understand where they stand against the competition and how much market share, they own. Having this information gives you the understanding of total addressable market and how much budget you need to allocate for Q4.
Analyse Share of Voice: Track and boost visibility for specific keywords using Amazon’s Share of Voice report.
Understand seasonal variations and factors. Effectively distinguish between seasonal sales fluctuations and product-specific issues to simplify planning and enhance inventory management.
3. Create holiday deals :
Running deals can be an engaging way to boost sales on Amazon when you offer customers a discount on their purchases, especially during big events such as Prime Day or Black Friday.
To create a deal in Seller Central, go to the Advertising tab and click on “Deals.” Then click on “Create a new deal.”
Note: Keep in mind though that if you want to run a deal on Amazon, they will charge you a fee. For a 7-day deal, the cost is $300and for a lightning deal, the cost is $150. During a big event or holiday, the deal fee may be more than that. If the costs make sense for you, test the deals out.
Create a coupon :
Sellers can also create a coupon that customers can see on your listing. To create a coupon, go to the Advertising tab and click on “Coupons.” Then click on “Create a new coupon.”
You can choose to offer a percentage discount or a price discount. Keep in mind that there is a $100 minimum budget for running a coupon and that budget will be shared with the discount you are offering plus a $0.60redemption fee for every discount redemption.
Prime Exclusive Discount
With this type of deal, you can offer an exclusive discount just for Amazon Prime members. Products with a Prime Exclusive Discount will show a discounted price with the regular price crossed out along with how much they’re saving in the search results.
During this time of year, try to always have some kind of deal or discount running to entice customers to purchase from you and not your competitors.
4. Prepare potential Delays & Returns :
As the year-end approaches, Amazon fulfilment centres often face significant delays, impacting sellers who wait too long to send inventory. To manage this, sellers should:
Request Additional Capacity: Use the Capacity Monitor to review your storage limits and request more space through Capacity Manager, especially during holiday deal events.
Plan Shipments Early: Account for extended supplier and carrier lead times during the busy season by shipping inventory well in advance.
Create an FBM Offer: Set up a Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM) option to maintain order fulfilment in case of FBA delays and stay competitive against stock shortages. Shipping items via FBM is a clever way to compete with competitors who may run out of stock.
Prepare for holiday returns : One downside of Amazon sales is the inevitable product returns. It’s just a part of doing business. While many sellers can expect December to be their best sales month of the year, January is usually the busiest for returned items.
Amazon’s Extended Holiday Return Policy allows customers to return items bought between October 11 and December 25, 2024, until January 31, 2025.
5. Create a Media Plan & PPC Strategy :
To manage the anticipated surge in Amazon traffic during the holiday season, it's advisable to develop a well-structured spending plan. A jump in customer traffic is expected that can causes PPC budgets to exhaust quickly. A thumb-rule is to have 1.7X- 2.3X the budget for Holiday season’s quarter vs. the previous quarters.
Layer your strategy with Retargeting Ads: Use retargeting ads on Amazon or Walmart to target users who interacted with your products but didn't purchase.
Day-Parting Strategy: Identify the optimal days and times for customer engagement and allocate ad spend during those periods for maximum impact.
Increase Keyword Bids: With increased competition, raise your keyword bids to ensure your ads receive the maximum possible impressions.
Experiment various AD strategies: Test various ad types during this time of year — the ones you don’t typically use may now work better for you. Do ask you agency to split the budgets into various AD types like Sponsored Products, Display and Sponsored Brand so you can be sure your ads are covering the entire ecosystem of your users.
2024 Holiday Peak FBA Fulfilment Fee Update :
Amazon has revised its Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) fees, introducing a Holiday Peak Fulfilment Fee for FBA orders from October 15, 2024, to January 14, 2025. Sellers should account for these changes when calculating profitability metrics during this period. Please check out FBA fees article to learn more about the fee increase.
Final Thoughts :
Prepare proactively for a successful holiday season by utilizing the data available in your Seller account to accurately forecast sales volume. This step-by-step guide is designed to help you navigate the busy period. For any additional questions, feel free to reach back to us.
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