The holiday season is upon us, and for sellers, it is crucial to know the steps to maximize Q4’s holiday sales on Amazon. For most, the holiday season means gatherings, family, fun, and gift exchanges. For Amazon sellers, all of those stand true, but it also means Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Holiday sales.

It is paramount to make preparations for the holiday shopping season if you are an Amazon seller. If historical trends stand tried and true, Amazon’s Q4 2021 will be huge. 

If your goal is to outperform your competition and to have the best Q4 to date, it will be critical for you to follow these steps to maximize Q4’s holiday sales on Amazon. Are you prepared for it? If not, we’ve got you covered!

Have Your Promotions Ready

You must schedule your Amazon promotions for Cyber Monday and Black Friday early to make sure you are ready for the holiday sales that are upon us. Our team here at TurnKey always suggests running promotions during Q4 to keep up with the competition. 

Here are some options we would recommend for the holidays season: 

• Amazon Lightning Deals and 7 Day Deals: Usually these opportunities are submitted months in advance but it is important to make sure you are checking for these opportunities if they do come up. We highly suggest running these deals because they are not available for all brands, only a select group. 
• Coupon Clippings: If you can’t run a lightning deal or 7-day deal, coupon clippings are the next best thing due to visibility on the listing and in the search results. For these coupon clippings, we would suggest a strong offer on Black Friday and Cyber Monday and a continued offer through December to stay competitive. 
• Prime Exclusive Discounts: These are great because they provide strike-through pricing making the customer see the great deal they are getting which can really help with conversions. The only downside is only Prime Members will see the offer. 
• Promotional Codes: Unfortunately, promo codes do not have high visibility so if you do plan on running this promotion this holiday season we highly suggest pairing it with an email blast or social media post to get more eyes on the deal. We also would suggest putting together promo codes that push cross-selling like a BOGO or a tiered promo code. 

Regardless of your Amazon promotional preference, it is super important to make sure you are running promotions to get more eyes on the listing. 

Plan Your Advertising

When it comes to Amazon PPC and DSP, there is not a one size fits all tactic. PPC and DSP as you all know take a ton of time and testing to find what works for your specific brand. When it comes to the holidays this rings even more true. 

Here are our TurnKey best Q4 PPC and DSP tactics: 

• Build off of what is currently working for you prior to Q4, this means optimizing your current Amazon campaigns not creating new ones. Amazon thrives off of historic data so new campaigns will not perform as well as past campaigns. 
• Watch your budgets, bids, and be prepared to spend a bit more. During Q4 advertising prices increase so it is common to have to spend more to advertise. We suggest increasing your budgets and also making sure you are staying within budget throughout the day and not running out of funds. 
• Shift more of your budget towards SBAs (sponsored brand ads). Historically, we have seen that SBAs convert a lot better than regular Sponsored Product ads, the reason being there are a lot more creative capabilities through SBAs as well as stronger placements. 
• For DSP, you should also be ready to spend a bit more since placements can be a bit more competitive. 

Our best advice for Q4 PPC and DSP strategies is if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, do what you always do with your PPC advertising and be ready to increase that budget to compete. 

The Next Level Beyond Promotions and PPC 

We started with the basics when talking through the promotional opportunities and PPC tactics but realistically you guys already know this stuff right? But how do you take it to the next level? 

Unfortunately, when it comes to Amazon in order to make an impact you have to go beyond the basics you can put together in Seller Central. It has been proven that ranking is now much more reliant on external traffic than ever before. 

Our team recommends that during the holidays you use external assets like email and social media to get additional reach to your products. But like PPC we cannot stress enough use what has already been proven to work for you. 

Your team should consider rolling out the following tactics to get some additional visibility to your products: 

• Email Blasts 
• Facebook Advertising 
• Social Media Posts 
• Physical Mailers 
• Google Advertising 
• Anything else you have at your disposal! 

We definitely are not saying you have to do everything mentioned above BUT you should find at least one external asset to use during Q4 to push traffic preferably using Amazon Attribution links so you can track the results. 

Amazon Inventory 

Now that we have talked through the fun stuff, let’s talk a little bit about the more technical side of things with Amazon Inventory. 

For those of you that don’t know, all FBA inventory must be inbound by October 21st to the Amazon warehouses if you want it to be eligible for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 

To get the best results for Q4 we highly recommend forecasting your inventory ahead of time to have an idea of how much inventory you are going to send in. In our experience, we have seen that the majority of categories see a sales increase even if they aren’t considered holiday items. The reason is, there are more shoppers on Amazon during Q4 so it’s common for everyone to see an increase. 

We would suggest a minimum you expect sales to increase by 10% so your inventory forecasting needs to reflect that. For those of you that have done a Q4 on Amazon, we would also suggest looking at how you did last year and base your forecasting around that. 

All in all, you need to keep close tabs on your inventory and be prepared to send inventory in quickly if you see you are running low. This potentially means smaller and more frequent shipments so be prepared! 

Happy Q4

Amazon Q4 in general can feel incredibly daunting but preparing ahead of time can really alleviate the stress of the biggest time of the year. Not too sure how to plan for Q4 still? Reach out to our team here at TurnKey! We can help you plan or even take it off of your plate! Schedule a breakthrough session with our team today.