Amazon Prime Day 2023: how to prepare your business

Discover everything you need to know to prepare your business strategy for the upcoming Amazon Prime Day 2023.

The history of Amazon Prime Day

Although Amazon Prime Day is a relatively recent discount day, it has already become one of the biggest sales days of the year. Its history dates back to 2015, when this day was held in 9 countries, including Spain, as well as Japan, Germany, Canada, Austria, France, the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy. At that time, Prime Day lasted 24 hours.

Since then, Amazon Prime Day has become increasingly popular and has even increased in length. In 2022, this major event has been held in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, Poland, Sweden, India, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as the previously mentioned countries, and in Egypt, the latter being the first time this country was included. The duration of Amazon Prime Day has been increased to 48 hours, instead of the initial 24 hours.

Requirements to participate as a Seller on Amazon Prime Day

On Amazon Prime Day, products that have exclusive discounts feature the Prime Day deals badge to Prime members. However, not all sellers are eligible for it. You have to meet the following requirements to qualify:

Make sure you can sell your products under the Prime tag. To be eligible to participate in this day, you have two options:
- Sell through the Seller Managed Prime program.
- Sell through Amazon FBA.

Your company must have a minimum seller score of 4. However, sellers who have not yet received buyer scores will also be eligible for the exclusive Prime discount on Prime Day.
The product eligible for the discount must have at least a three and a half star rating or none at all, in case it has not received any ratings yet.
The discount to be applied must be at least 20% of the price without offer for non-Prime members.
The Prime-only discounted price must be 5% lower than the lowest price of the product with the same Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) in the last 30 days. In this regard, the lowest price in the last 30 days is considered to be the lowest order price of the ASIN in that period, including all sale prices, promotions and rebates from all sellers.
Also, the Amazon Prime exclusive discount must meet the usual criteria, which you can check at this link.

Do some good inventory planning

Amazon Prime Day is not a normal shopping day. Your product is going to get more visits than any other time of the year and, consequently, more chances for sales.

Therefore, and to avoid stock-outs, sellers operating under the Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) option should have their inventory ready to arrive at fulfillment centers 2-4 weeks before Amazon Prime Day. For example, last year in 2022, Spanish sellers had to ensure that Amazon's logistics and distribution centers had all inventory on June 27, 15 days before the event.

As you can see, preparing for Amazon Prime Day is not something you can leave to the last minute, as you must have your inventory guaranteed and organized weeks in advance. This planning becomes even more important during a time of supply chain crisis like the one we are experiencing today. Buying your inventory in advance will help you reduce the uncertainty generated by carrier shortages, delivery delays and raw material shortages.

However, the investment required to buy inventory so far in advance is not an affordable expense for everyone and can cause internal cash flow strains.

To help you improve your company's working capital cycles, RITMO has developed an invoice financing solution: RITMO Invoice Financing. Through this solution, sellers can purchase inventory when they need it and RITMO will take care of those invoices by paying suppliers directly. In this way sellers decide in which term to pay each invoice, adjusting to their needs.

Plan your marketing campaigns

Amazon Prime Day is an excellent time to give visibility to your brand. In fact, you should start as soon as possible so that, when the time comes, you can attract your entire audience with exclusive offers. To do this, you can take some actions now:

Review your Amazon PPC (Pay-per-click) campaigns, considering bidding more aggressively for products that have more relevant keywords to improve your organic ranking before Prime Day.
Try to attract more audience to Amazon through targeted external campaigns, using tools such as Facebook Ads or Google Ads, through social media or by running traditional advertising campaigns. You can even recycle this content in Amazon Posts. Every action within your Amazon marketing strategy, no matter how small it may seem, will improve your chances of increasing sales during Amazon Prime Day.
Don't neglect your product reviews. Take advantage of each sale to ask buyers for their opinion. Keep in mind that, on the one hand, having good feedback on your products is a requirement for participating in Amazon Prime Day and, on the other hand, it improves your positioning on Amazon.

Optimize your listings

As a seller in the marketplace, one of the actions you should do right now is to optimize your Amazon listings. This listing must be as attractive as possible to obtain an adequate conversion. To do this, you can perform a series of actions:

Check all your listings, checking the title, bulletpoints, images and descriptions and make sure they are correctly updated.
If you are a registered trademark, consider using the split-testing tool to maximize the potential of your product listing.

In any case, you should never assume that your product listing is 100% optimized. It is a task that you should continuously review to improve and optimize your commercial offer according to different factors, such as market trends, your needs as a seller or even the competition. This is especially relevant when your goal is to sell more on a particular day and all other sellers are doing the same.

Offer deals and discounts to customers

If you want to entice more customers to buy your products during Prime Day, we recommend that you offer Amazon Prime Day deals, discounts and promotions in your ads. Below, we're going to point out four different ways you can make your customers save:

Prime Exclusive Discount: This is an exclusive discount, as it is only accessible to Amazon Prime members. Typically, these are more substantial discounts than the regular discounts available to non-Prime customers. If you want to set up a discount in Seller Central, go to the "Advertising > Prime Exclusive Discounts" tab.
Coupons: On Amazon, a coupon is a digital voucher that provides a discount or promotional offer on eligible products. Coupons are usually available for a limited time and can be applied during the checkout process to reduce the price of the item for which they are valid.
Create a promotion: Amazon sellers can create different promotions in Seller Central, such as "buy one get one free", "buy one get one 50% off". Another option is to create personalized promotional codes on social networks to share with your audience.

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