Amazon Prime Day, the global two-day shopping event, offers valuable insight into what to expect for upcoming busy shopping periods such as Black Friday and the Christmas holidays. This year’s July sale saw UK consumers spend a record £1.3bn over two days, indicating a promising outlook for the upcoming peak season.
During major shopping periods, unprepared sellers may face challenges like delivery delays, inventory shortfalls, creating customer dissatisfaction. However, Prime Day’s yearly surge in sales and shopper activity offers brands valuable learnings to refine their retail media approach and streamline operations for the upcoming peak season.
Here are five tips brands can take from Amazon Prime Day to help prepare for a profitable peak shopping season:
1. Data is key
Prime Day provides sellers with a treasure trove of data, offering insights into sales trends, customer behaviour and inventory management. For example, a recent report from Rithum found that consumer electronics, home and kitchen appliances, and clothing were the best-selling categories during Prime Day in 2023. This kind of data can help sellers understand current consumer preferences and refine strategies accordingly for a strong Q4.
These reports should be tailored to each brand’s specific business goals, helping sellers optimise advertising spend and ensure they’re hitting the right target audiences. Fine-tuning ad spend based on these insights will help maintain momentum, positioning brands for a strong year-end performance.
2. Dynamic inventory management
Automation tools are crucial for efficient inventory control during busy shopping periods. Dynamic pricing, real-time monitoring, and stock notifications can avert both shortages and surplus issues, ensuring brands can swiftly respond to sudden changes in consumer demand. Features such as automated repricing can adjust prices based on competitor rates and stock levels, helping sellers stay competitive without constant manual oversight. Performance tracking tools can also spot and tackle issues in real time, enabling quick adjustments during high-volume sales events.
3. Keep an eye on the bottom line
An all-encompassing view of costs, including shipping, storage and platform fees, is vital for maintaining profitability during busy shopping periods. By implementing tools that offer a comprehensive overview of current costs, sellers can make well-informed decisions on pricing and ad spend, ensuring each transaction positively impacts profit margins.
For instance, real-time tracking of shipping expenses, storage and platform fees helps sellers grasp how overall spending impacts total revenue. This holistic view of costs enables more effective margin control and minimises the risk of lost revenue.
4. Streamline shipping
Last year, UK shoppers spent £24bn online over the holiday period, up 3.7 per cent year-on-year, with the highest spends on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Boxing Day. With the continued growth of online shopping, brands may be caught out by the sheer volume of orders requiring shipping. Integrated systems can help sellers handle increased order volumes, without sacrificing the quality of service. Sellers can leverage these tools for order routing, shipping and returns to increase efficiency and customer satisfaction.
For brands selling across multiple platforms, order routing and management tools enable sellers to monitor and handle orders from various marketplaces, such as Amazon and eBay, in a single interface, ensuring timely and precise deliveries. Utilising platforms capable of integrating with diverse shipping carriers can even automate tracking information updates, providing customers with real-time updates on their purchases. Moreover, an effective returns management system can simplify the processing of returns and exchanges, offering a seamless post-purchase experience for customers.
5. Step up your advertising game
Reflecting on the results from the recent Prime Day, brands can improve campaigns to boost visibility and return on investment. As peak season approaches, sellers should consider gradually scaling back retail media spend to build on Prime Day successes without deflating progress made. Monitoring campaign performance and making real-time adjustments can prevent gaps in ad performance and ensure continuous sales momentum.
Using data from their full-funnel e-commerce businesses, brands can track ad performance and consumer behaviour to dynamically adjust bidding, budgets and ad targeting on an hourly basis. Experimenting with various ad types across the marketing funnel enables swift responses to market changes, maximising campaign impact.
This year’s Amazon Prime Day has provided brands with fresh perspectives to capitalise on its success and optimise for the upcoming peak sales period. Equipped with these insights, sellers are well-positioned to drive profitability during the peak season.
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