How to Prepare for Amazon Prime Day 2024?

During the first quarter 2024, Amazon generated total net sales of over 143 billion U.S. dollars. In the USA, the number of subscribers using Amazon Prime services has been growing steadily over the last several years and is forecasted to reach new heights in 2024, and the upcoming Amazon Prime Day in 2024 is again expected to rank among the year's greatest online shopping events.

What started out as a celebration of Amazon’s 20th anniversary in 2015 has now transformed into one of the most awaited and successful global retail occasions. Thoigh the official dates are not out yet but the mega online event is most probably set to run between July16-17 this year. According to Andrew Lipsman of Insider Intelligence, "Mid-July used to be one of the sleepiest times for retailers, and Prime Day has really reshaped the dynamics." Though Amazon Shoppers still have some time left to get into their buying shoes, it’s the right time for Amazon Sellers to start their preparation for Amazon Prime Day 2024. 

In this blog, we will deep dive into the best practices that sellers need to follow to make it big this year. Our checklist will help sellers prepare for days before, during, and after Amazon Prime Day 2024.

Let’s dive in!

Note: Also read our detailed blog on "Turbocharging Your Black Friday Sales on Amazon & Walmart with Data-Driven Strategies" to make the most out of your holiday season sale.

How to make it big with Amazon Prime Day this year?

Everyone knows that Amazon offers Pre-Prime day deals and one of the best ways for sellers to prepare for these deals is to identify your best-selling products and customize listings accordingly. From lucrative ad copy and graphics to limited-duration coupons, sellers can use multiple ways to engage shoppers on the retail platform. It is important to note that effective marketing can help sellers drive traffic to your Amazon storefront but data is the key that can help you manage and traffic & track your marketing efforts. Here’s How DataChannel can help you to get ready for Amazon Prime Day by leveraging the kind of data that drives conversions and sales.

Before Prime Day

Review past performance: By looking back at how well your previous year's sales went, you should be able to determine your best-selling items. Monitoring that performance requires careful attention to key indicators like ACoS, click-through rate, impressions, and clicks, among others. Reviewing past year’s data involves monitoring and building insights out of your last year’s prime day campaigns that can be done using Amazon Ads’ Brand Metrics report. It helps you fetch granular metrics such as the top_performing_customers, customer conversion rates, products added-to-cart, product detail page views, and new to brand customers along with their conversion rates. This data can help you easily differentiate between your ad campaigns that performed exceptionally well and which didn’t. For sellers using a combination of both Amazon DSP and Sponsored ads then identifying the right ad and media mix for the upcoming Amazon Prime Day should be the goal. ‍

Optimize product listings: Make sure your product titles, descriptions (>80 characters to be precise), and photos are current and optimized for search rankings when creating product listings.  Amazon Sellers and Vendors can use the listings’ report to quickly get a snapshot of their currently listed products and build insights into their active, open, cancelled or suppressed listings with their associated reasons. This listings data can help them determine listings available for purchase and which are not so that the sellers can either fix the problem or remove the listing completely. Amazon Vendor Central’s Search Term Reports  that can be used to identify what customers are actually searching on Amazon. It provides the search frequency rank for all of your terms, indicating each one’s search volume on Amazon. The lower the search frequency rank, the higher the search volume. The Search Term Reports’ data can be used very efficiently to optimize your product listings based on your keyword ranks and frequency accordingly.

Keyword & ASIN Targeting: Amazon’s Search-term report can help you big time with keyword targeting. You can identify your high-performing keywords with a fine level of granularity for any number of days with DataChannel. Interestingly, you can also target your competitor's product detail pages (PDP) by targeting specific ASINs. If running ads on competitor’s PDPs turns out fruitful for you in the days before the sale then you can also use a mix of both Keyword and ASIN targeting on the big day as well.

Manage Inventory Level: Now that you have identified your best-selling products, it’s mission-critical that you don’t stock out on these products. You need to keep track of your inventory levels and restock popular items when demand increases. Getting near real-time inventory-level data is possible with DataChannel, simply set up & schedule your data pipeline and you can closely monitor your inventory feed easily to avoid any discrepancies. Prime Day Sellers can use our Amazon Seller Central’s: Inventory Health endpoint to accurately ascertain the quantity of inventory units that have been stored in Amazon's fulfillment centers for 0 to 90 days. This metric helps sellers understand how much of their inventory is relatively new and has been in storage for a short period of time.

During Prime Day

Leverage Off-Amazon Sales Channels: When managing product prices on Amazon, it's also a good idea to compare them with other prevalent e-commerce sites like Walmart and Shopify. If the price difference is huge between these platforms you might lose out on your customers on these platforms. DataChannel can help you get a complete picture of your data coming in from Walmart, Shopify, and Amazon as well, furthermore, you can also identify your best-selling products on other platforms so that you can invest your advertising budget into promoting the same products on Amazon as well.

Amazon Marketing Stream for Real-time Attribution: On Prime Day one thing you need to ensure beforehand is that you don’t run out of budget and also that your ads are performing well. With Amazon Marketing Stream you can ensure that you always have enough budget for your ads.
Amazon Marketing Stream also supports recommendation endpoints that provides data around Low-performing ad campaigns with less than usual ad impressions but high budget usage. Not only the low performing ones via Amazon Marketing Stream sellers can also identify High-performing campaigns with greater ROAS, or The ASINs that are forecasted to have high sales in the next few upcoming days or weeks. These hourly data insights can be really helpful during prime day to clearly determine if the deals and discounts offered to the customers are driving any positive result or not.

After Prime Day

Monitor performance: Throughout the Prime Day event, monitor your sales, traffic, and cost-per-click to spot any problems or areas for improvement. Generally, the CPC tends to remain somewhat higher during the Prime Day Sales event, so you can manage your advertising budget and promotional offers accordingly. 

Sales Data Analysis: Even though the Prime Day event only lasts for 30 hours, vendors can still anticipate purchases in the days that follow. Sellers can get a complete picture of their retail analytics by determining the new-to-brand customers, if the ASINs or keywords they targeted performed as per expectations or not, and by comparing their sales and traffic report before, during, and after the sales. Amazon Sellers and Vendors can analyze their sales data during prime day after its successful completion using the Sales and Traffic Report by Date and ASINs. These endpoints can provide important metrics such as Units Ordered, Shipped; Sales associated with ordered and shipped products, no. of orders returned for a particular customer along with their specific SKUs. This data can help you find out if any particular ASIN has more no. of returns or to establish the total or net sales generated during prime day with accurate vendor reporting to attribute sales data to the correct vendor.

Ad Performance Data: Strong ad performance is necessary for overall Amazon success, as higher sales for an individual product directly influences its ranking ability on Amazon. The more it sells, the higher it ranks. Questions that can help you better understand your Prime Day ads performance can revolve around Ad Revenue, Average Order Value (AOV) or any change in the no. of orders (you can use Market Basket Analysis to identify if customers were more inclined toward purchasing bundled items or individual products. Sellers can use Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to monitor their ad performance for both Amazon Sponsored Ads & DSP and to identify which ad mix drove more conversions and traffic to your product detail pages and Amazon storefronts. 

*Bonus Tool

Using Keepa, you can closely monitor Prime Day deals for any Amazon product, tracking price changes for your competitors' items in real-time. This tool allows you to identify the top-performing best sellers that stood out during Amazon Prime Day, showcasing which products were most popular and loved by customers. By leveraging this data, you can gain insights into market trends and consumer preferences, enabling you to make informed decisions and stay ahead in the competitive landscape.

Amazon Prime Day is a mainstream retail event, and shoppers wait for it eagerly. It provides sellers the best opportunity to increase their foothold among customers. But all of this would mean nothing if you don’t have your data ready, it is as crucial to measure and evaluate your marketing techniques so that your money doesn’t go down the drain. By incorporating our above-mentioned techniques, sellers can leverage the sales event and Amazon platform to its fullest potential. 

Now that you have gone through our important tips and techniques, Get Set, and Sell! Schedule a demo call with us to discover how DataChannel can help you capitalize on your Amazon data for Amazon Prime Day, and Black Friday Sale.