7 Checks to Make Before Amazon Prime Day

Prime Day 2021 is upon us!

Amazon has announced Prime Day 2021 will be over the 21st and 22nd of June.

Prime day is a great opportunity to get exposure, sell more products and move excess stock. But, if you are not prepared, it can be a challenge for ecommerce businesses. It can even lead to being struck off from Prime if these challenges result in you not being able to fulfill orders within Amazon’s requirements.

To help, we created this simple ten-point checklist to help you make sure you are fully prepared for Prime Day.

1 Spruce up your product listings

One of the keys to success on Prime Day is maximizing visibility and upping your conversion rates. With Prime Day approaching it’s the perfect time to make sure your listings are in perfect condition. 

Now’s the time to take another look at your listings and make sure they are perfect. Below is a quick checklist to help you make sure you have your listings in order:

Images - Are they high quality, do you have any better ones, and do they meet Amazon’s image requirements?

Content - Is your content concise and snackable? Are you using clear bullet points? 

Titles - Do your titles give all the information they need? According to Nemdol. The ideal anatomy of a title is:

"Brand - model - gender - what it is - important marketing fact - color - material - other important specs - conditions"

Giving the example of:

Persol 2997-S men’s sunglasses made in Italy matte silver metal frame mirrored polarized lenses new

To learn more about writing titles for product listings, you may want to read Nemdol’s article ‘How to write eCommerce listing titles that sell on marketplaces’

Are you answering key questions? - Your customers may have questions about your products before they buy. Make sure you give them all the answers they need.

Does your content look good on mobile? - Mobile is key to everything online, and this is definitely true on Amazon. Amazon is the most popular shopping app in the world (with 150million users accessing the app in September 2019 alone). So it’s imperative that your listings look great on mobile devices.

2 Double check your backend keywords

Backend keywords are used to help Amazon understand what specific listings are targeting. You only get five fields, and each one has a fifty-word character limit, so you have to make each character count.

Perform these checks to make sure your backend keywords are in order:

• Stay under the limit. If you go over the limit none of your search terms will be indexed. 
• Don’t overuse variations of the same keyword.
• Cut out ‘stop words’ like ‘a, an, any’.
• Don’t use temporary words like ‘available now’.
• Cut out any repetitions.
• Include synonyms.
• Don’t use brand names or ASINs in search terms.
• Avoid using ASINs, your brand, or other brand names in Search Terms.

For best practices, take a look at Amazon’s own guide. 

3. Set up your kits and bundles

Prime Day is a great time to utilize bundles and kits to drive sales. People will be looking for quick deals, so make it easy for them to buy the group of products they want in one bundle.

Bundles are a particularly good way of moving products that are frequently bought at the same time, as they make it more convenient for the customer.  

Another strategy is to bundle top-selling items with products that haven’t sold so well. This helps you not only sell more but also move stale inventory off your shelves.

Setting up your kits and bundles on Amazon is one thing. But, if you are on Seller Fulfilled Prime, you will also need to make sure your picking staff is ready to fulfil them. To get the most out of kits and bundles you will need to make sure the information on Amazon is linked to the information your warehouse team receives when they have to fulfil the order. 

If you have an inventory management solution like Veeqo, this should be straightforward.

4. Can your staff handle the rush?

If you are on Seller Fulfilled Prime, it’s vital you have the capacity to maintain your fulfillment levels during a surge in sales. This may mean hiring temporary staff. If this is the case, you will need to make sure they are fully trained before Prime Day.

It would help if your picking processes are simple and fool-proof. Ideally, you will have a software platform that provides your pickers with an optimal picking route and system at the push of a button. If not, it may be worth trying to remember where errors occurred during previous sales peaks and making sure they won’t happen again.

If you do need to hire more staff for Prime Day, you will need to make sure they are trained in your picking processes. Another reason it’s important to make sure that these processes are as simple as possible to learn.

5. Set up your deals and discounts

Prime Day exists to help customers looking for deals. So you need to figure out how much of a discount you can afford to give. Your usual pricing strategies may not be enough to help you stand out from the crowd.

You need to go into Prime Day with your Spotlight, Lightning and standard deals in place, worked out and submitted ahead of time.

Fluid Commerce’s say their “top tip is to submit several variations of your lightning deals to speed up the process should one get disapproved.” You can read their top tips for preparing for Prime Day.

6. Plan your marketing spend

Prime Day requires its own marketing strategy and advertising budgets. You need to know in advance where you intend to spend your advertising budget and how you are going to monitor it.

It’s worth reviewing your historic ad performance. This way you can get a good understanding of what has worked in the past and adjust your strategy accordingly.

If you have any affiliates or influencers you work with, you should get in touch sooner rather than later to work out the best way to promote your brand on Prime Day. 

7. Check you have enough stock 

This seem obvious, but it’s something ecommerce businesses get wrong all the time. Inventory forecasting can be more complex than it seems. If you are simply estimating necessary stock levels based on how much you usually sell and how much stock you have, it could lead to under or overstocking.

Instead, you need to make sure you are basing your inventory levels based on previous Prime Days and similar events. In an ideal situation, you will have software capable of doing this dynamic forecasting for you. But if you don’t, you should be able to go back through your spreadsheets and figure out how much stock to need.

Remember, running out of stock can negatively affect the rankings of your listings. 

If you found this article interesting, why not learn about the biggest challenges facing eCommerce retailers right now.

Learn More About Veeqo's Inventory Management Solution

We hope this checklist helps you prepare for Prime Day and that you can look forward to a successful and profitable day. And, if you want to know more about the challenges facing ecommerce in general, read this article.

Veeqo is the ecommerce fulfillment platform designed to connect your inventory with the multichannel world of ecommerce.