As an Amazon seller, the hype in the run-up to Amazon’s Prime Days is huge, and the planning involved is significant, including deciding on your Prime Day event products and discounts, developing a marketing strategy, optimizing listings, ensuring inventory, scaling for increased customer inquires, and defining goals ahead of time. The lead time for deals can catch sellers unaware – it’s typically 2-3 months out, although Prime Day deals themselves can be applied the day before.
It’s been just over a month, the dust has settled, so was Prime Day a success? It clearly worked for Amazon, because the first day of Prime Day (actually a 2-day event) was the single largest sales day in Amazon’s history, beating 2022’s Black Friday. However, Amazon gets their cut whether sellers are making a profit, barely breaking even, or creating loss-leaders, so the question is how sellers made out? Most of the post Prime Day press has been about Amazon’s success, but in this blog article, we’ll examine how some of our clients fared.
The Prime Day opportunity
There is significant opportunity to increase sales and gain exposure, attracting new customers in the process, but Prime Days need to be approached strategically.
As a seller you will make incremental sales to two types of customers – cold consumers who discover your brand through the Prime Day sale, and warm consumers who are ‘cart-watching’ to see if the product they want drops in price.
Our own consumer research backs-up what Amazon is claiming about increased browsing behavior and brand discovery, and Prime Day sees a spike in this activity as many consumers spend time perusing for products they would consider purchasing if the right price.
With the plethora of Amazon price tracker apps, and consumer savviness increasing around cart-watching, you can win a customer who has both you and your competitor products in their cart.
Sellers should, wherever margins allow, include their best sellers in Prime Day deals. They are best sellers for a reason, and Prime Day isn’t an opportunity to dump slow-moving inventory. We tell clients frequently that boosting sales of existing best sellers yields the greatest lift in revenue, and not being competitive means your competitors win the sales and gain long-term customers. (Shifting slow or old inventory is a whole different topic, but the continuous use of Amazon promotions such as Prime Exclusive Discounts, Coupons, and 7-Day / Lightning Deals does this effectively, while never actually lowering your official prices and damaging your brand.)
Our 2023 summer Prime Day results
As mentioned, our strategy for Prime Day is to use clients’ best-selling products because the sales event can be the tipping point for shoppers who are watching a product or simply because that is the best way for consumers to discover the brand. There are a few situations where rather than offering a blanket discount, we provide discounts on larger counts if a product is available in different quantities.
We can’t share absolute numbers, but here are the relative results.
Trtl travel pillow
- We ran a Prime Exclusive Discount and Lighting Deal promotion on their most popular product, the Trtl Travel Pillow.
- During Prime Day, daily revenue was 25x the regular run-rate and unit sales were 36x the regular run-rate.
- Although the differential between increased revenue and unit sales represents an impact on margin, an impressive ACoS of 9.61% and the sheer scale of revenue increase meant that this was a very profitable promotion, with a ROAS of 10:1.
- Since Prime Day, Trtl has seen an increase sales and significant growth in their Canadian Marketplace with sales increasing by 10% week over week.
The DB Method Squat Machine
- We ran the Prime Day promotion on their main product, the Squat Machine.
- During Prime Day, daily revenue was 26x the regular run-rate and unit sales were 35x the regular run-rate.
- Although the differential between increased revenue and unit sales represents an impact on margin, a super low ACoS of 8.62% and the sheer scale of revenue increase meant that this was a very profitable promotion, with a ROAS of 11:1.
- July became the highest revenue month since their Amazon launch, which is impressive given July is usually a slow month for fitness equipment.
Connoisseurs jewelry care
- We ran Prime Day promotions on their top 3 products.
- During Prime Day, daily revenue was 9x the regular run-rate and unit sales were 11x the regular run-rate.
- Since then, the top SKU has increased 42% in sales week over week.
- Connoisseurs is also seeing an increase week over week in conversion rate.
Other successes include:
- GOSHI experienced an 11x increase in daily sales revenue during Prime Day, and, following the event, a lasting 13.3% lift in daily sales, which shows no signs of abating.
- Purity Coffee experienced a 7.5x increase in daily sales revenue during Prime Day, and, following the event, subscribe & save enrollments increased 13% which represents significant long-term revenue.
Prime Day’s short-term and long-term benefits
The additional revenue generated over the 2-day event and the efficiency with which this can be achieved proves the short-term value of the Prime Day concept as a standalone promotional tactic. What is important to note is that, due to the high number of conversions we see from non-branded search terms, we know that our clients were reaching new to brand customers. This obviously has a long-term benefit to brands, both in terms of repeat purchases and preference over the competition.
In terms of other quantifiable long-term benefits, the lasting impacts following Prime Day include a permanent lift in sales and increased conversion rates. These, when you no longer need to support the Prime Day discounts, are further reasons to take advantage of Prime Days.
What’s next for Prime Days?
Amazon recently announced a new fall Prime Day event in October. The deadline for sellers to register Lightening Deals and Prime Exclusive Discounts was August 11th, but brands can still implement Prime Day deals and the deadline for Black Friday / Cyber Monday registration is not until September 2nd.
If you want to talk about your Prime Day strategy, please get in contact today.
