That said, economic uncertainty has prompted shoppers to search for the best deals and product value ahead of Black Friday, making the preparation window for sellers much shorter than in previous years. What’s more, Salesforce anticipates that 51% of consumers will purchase fewer holiday gifts this time around.

To help you reach consumers when they are ready to buy and make the most of this season, we built a list of tips that will get every aspect of your ecommerce business up to speed. With excess inventory, inflationary pressures and other unprecedented events, it’s vital to give your Amazon seller strategy the final tweaks it needs to positively impact your sales in Q4. Here’s what you need to know.

Consider these key seller dates.

According to Amazon, these are some of the main dates and events to prepare for. Be sure to mark your calendar so that you don’t miss any opportunities.

• August 3rd - Holiday promotion submissions open in Vendor Central and Seller Central.
• September 17th - Deadline to submit 7-day deals, Best Deals, and Lightning Deals.
• October 21st to November 17th - Inbound shipping cutoff for vendors: Deal inventory must be in transit.
• October 24th to November 17th - FBA inventory cut-off date for sellers: Shipments should arrive well before the key shopping dates for the holiday season. Inventory should arrive at fulfillment centers by this date.

Set relevant goals.

Once you’ve marked the critical Amazon holiday deadlines on your calendar, start preparing the required elements and thinking about budget allocation across this prolonged season. Amazon advertising and promotion budgets should be specifically planned around these peak dates. 

As you start campaign planning, it’s important to set realistic expectations and key performance indicators that you can regularly keep track of on your data dashboard. If you’re uncertain what those should be, consider building out KPIs for each one of the steps outlined here, and keep in mind that your numbers may differ from other seasons. Audiences are often subject to change during the holidays, which is why our experts recommend determining your audience pre-holiday season to better plan your campaigns and initiatives.

A good step is to leverage past sales data (including Prime Day) to inform your strategy and goal-setting for this year. This will also help when it comes to inventory planning.

Become retail ready.

As we always say, advertising drives the most highly-qualified traffic, and retail readiness drives conversion. But what does it mean to be retail-ready? 

1. Inventory management

First, ensure you have an inventory plan in place. The sooner you can determine which products you plan on selling and guarantee you're not facing any inventory issues such as spoilage, deadstock, or low or high inventory levels, the sooner you can plan your other business elements. A fundamental part of managing inventory is reviewing your past sales to forecast this year's. Analyze your products' historical data, their performance during Prime Day, and which of your items (and your competitors’) could skyrocket during the holidays.

The next step is to ship your inventory to Amazon fulfillment centers before November 2 for Black Friday and December 1 for Christmas. With shipping and inventory in place, you can move on to advertising strategies, promotions, product detail pages and catalogs according to the products you have in stock.

2. Optimized content on Amazon

Product detail pages are vital for driving conversions and building trust with your customers, so spend time optimizing your pages' critical elements, then split-testing your work. We recommend starting with your product detail pages and A+ content. Ideally, this should begin as early as possible as A+ content takes the longest to build out. We encourage sellers to start preparing their creative in September.

If you’re not sure whether you need to update your A+ content, ask yourself: are we using comparison charts? Are we using all five modules? What about Brand Story? If the answer is no, it’s probably a good time to take another look at your content. What’s more, you can take the opportunity to refresh your current images and add holiday themes and festive overlays. Your images should sell the product on their own. Once creative is produced, add it to the platform to ensure Amazon approves it in advance.

Brand Stores should also be tailored for the holiday season. One strategy for your Brand Store is to create "store versions," where you can duplicate a page in your store, update the images, videos, or layout and schedule that version to run during a predesignated period. Store versions are helpful for quick updates that you wouldn't want to carry over into the new year or past a specific peak season. Another strategy is adding a Holiday Favorites page and running Sponsored Brand Ads. These should be done at least a month in advance. 

Our tip for optimizing copy is to review your top ASINs ahead of time to determine the top sellers and ensure they have robust titles, bullets, and descriptions. Be careful when adding keywords like "gift" or "present" in your listings during the holiday season, as it goes against Amazon policies. Instead, be strategic in how you are updating your listing copy and backend terms, determine what highly qualified keywords competitors are using and aim to be informative to your target customer.

3. Keyword Research

The months leading into Q4 and the holiday season are great times to conduct keyword research, update your current list and search for holiday-centric keywords to evaluate every opportunity.

Develop a competitive promotional strategy.

We can’t depend on consumers searching across e-retails, we need to stand out among the competition with an attractive promotional strategy. Some of the Amazon promotions that can come in handy during this long holiday season are:

1. Amazon Coupons (run time of up to 90 days)

Flexible and low-cost, these are great for driving velocity and increasing sales.

2. Best Deal/7-Day Deals (run time of up to two weeks for Vendors and one week for Sellers)

These are brand awareness tools that are better suited for well-established brands on the platform. The discount minimums are high, and merchandising fees are required.

3. Lightning Deals (run time of up to 12 hours)

Similar to above, these are high-cost brand awareness tools. They also have rigid approval policies and, even if approved, they are not guaranteed to run. Longer run times allow for more traffic to be driven to detail pages.

4. Promo Codes (run time of up to 120 days)

Great for brands with a strong social media presence or marketing campaigns. These can attract customers to buy on the channel and capture new purchases. Promo codes are the best option for specific targeting and having more control over the audience you reach.

It’s important to keep in mind that deals have a submission deadline. This year, it fell on September 17th for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Also, review run times to better plan out your season’s promotional strategy.

Consider these Amazon Advertising best practices.

Once you have everything in place to be retail-ready, Amazon Advertising is necessary to unlock growth over the holiday season. It will not only help with competitive visibility; it can also improve organic rank and drive incremental sales when done correctly.

Considering the budgets you have determined in your goal-setting phase, you should start building your advertising campaigns based on your objectives. If you are a new seller with a new product, we recommend you begin your advertising efforts as soon as possible. Three months is the minimum to gather data and gain relevance within the algorithm. 

For sellers with existing products, give yourself at least a month in advance to begin new campaigns or refresh your current ones. Your products have triggered the flywheel or rank organically, so they will have an easier time staying relevant during the holiday season. Build awareness in advance through high-volume seasonal search terms—leading up to higher-converting campaigns to retarget and capture those early visitors when they are ready to buy.

Last but not least, examine your data and metrics regularly to ensure your holiday advertising strategy is as optimized as possible throughout the season. 

Recap the peak season.

The work you or your agency have to do on Amazon doesn’t end after the holidays. It’s fundamental to look back at your wins and losses over the last couple of months to guide your 2023 planning and continue to drive visibility on the platform.

Some ways to recap the season include:

• Reviewing analytics to measure your successes (or failures) and your competitors’.
• Paying attention to customer feedback through reviews, cancellations and returns.
• Applying learnings to your New Year planning.
• Refreshing your keyword lists, ads and content to remove seasonal copies and imagery.

All in all, it’s never too late to set your business up for success. While the task may seem daunting, spending your time and effort on a brief list of products that move the needle is what will pay off. Follow these steps, make relevant optimizations and results will follow.

Learn more information about our Amazon Services.

It’s no secret that Amazon continuously innovates to improve the shopping experience for sellers and shoppers alike. Still, the company recognized that merchants (otherwise known as sellers, brands, or retailers on the Amazon platform) are looking for ways to broaden their reach beyond the Amazon platform. Amazon has historically been reluctant to send shoppers anywhere besides its platform but has recognized the need for further growth and success. Read on to learn more about the new expansions announced at Amazon Accelerate 2022.

1. Testing to Optimize

Manage Your Experiments allows sellers to run A/B Tests on individual product listing pages, comparing two versions of content against one another to identify the best performing version. Learn more about A/B Testing on Amazon here.



So what’s new? In October 2022, sellers will be able to utilize new capabilities for A/B testing to optimize product listings, including the ability to test bullet points and descriptions, which was not an option before. 



Another addition to testing capabilities is the “experiment to significance” option, which allows Amazon to determine when the campaign ends (after accumulating statistically significant data). Rather than analyzing results from a specific timeframe, the “experiment to significance” option focuses on consumer interaction.  

2. Tailored Audiences

A new capability within the Manage Your Customer Engagement tool was added to allow Amazon sellers to increase their email marketing reach and build stronger relationships with shoppers. Using the new “Tailored Audiences” tool, which is currently in beta but will be available to eligible sellers come 2023, sellers can proactively send email marketing campaigns to shoppers to increase brand awareness, customer loyalty and overall engagement.

Previously, shoppers had to follow the Brand Store to receive email campaigns from the brand. With the new additions, brands can now target three different audience types: repeat customers, recent customers and high-speed customers.

Put simply, when a shopper purchases on Amazon, they are automatically added to the seller’s email list and categorized appropriately. This update will help sellers build deeper relationships with repeat shoppers earlier, maintain current relationships and potentially increase overall sales. You can learn more about tailored audiences on Amazon’s blog.

But that’s not all that’s new to the Manage Your Customer Engagement tool. Since sellers on Amazon have expressed difficulty interpreting experiment results, Amazon rolled out a new feature that sends notifications during the MYE process if the new content versions do not lead to meaningful results. Also, sellers can authorize Seller Central to auto publish winning content to product detail pages if it is at least 66% better in November 2022.

3. Buy with Prime – Marketing Expansion

In April 2022, Amazon announced a new way for brands to grow their DTC store through its Buy with Prime (BwP) program. This invite-only program is a way for brands to connect with their off-Amazon audiences and provide them with Prime benefits. 

Here’s what’s new: Amazon amplified this program by adding a new Buy with Prime page within the Brand Store, to which sellers can drive shoppers through Sponsored Brand ads. With the ability to customize the page, shoppers can preview products and complete their purchases on the brand’s DTC store.

Additionally, Amazon has offered to invest in co-branded BwP Facebook and Instagram ads with approved sellers. Though this is an invitation-only beta opportunity, Amazon’s decision to fund and manage these ads shows the value and impact they believe BwP can have for sellers.

Sellers can utilize a new BwP badge in product listings to show they offer Prime benefits on their DTC store, further enticing shoppers to purchase from the independently run DTC site. You can dive into the new Buy with Prime additions here.

4. Premium A+ Content 

A new upgrade to the standard content management system (CMS), available to all brands worldwide, now supports larger modules on product pages. Modules include video, interactive features, image carousels and Q&A. 

5. Amazon Marketing Stream

While Amazon Marketing Stream was introduced as a beta program a few months ago, it wasn’t until now that this push-based marketing and metrics system can share data visualizations to improve a brand’s overall business performance. The provided heatmaps, callouts stack ranking, and more can be utilized to further optimize advertising copy, leading to sustainable growth on the Amazon platform.

6. Improved Seller Experience

Amazon Accelerate offered a few notable updates that improve the experience for Amazon sellers.

• A newly consolidated FBA dashboard: With a list of actions to grow sellers’ businesses, the new dashboard summarizes shipments and defects, identifies SKUs that need replenishment, and highlights any excess inventory/shipping needs.
• Account Health Assurance Program: This program prevents account deactivation with good ratings as long as sellers work with Amazon. To be eligible for this program, sellers must maintain high account health and have a valid emergency number on file.
• Call Me Now Button: This button is available on the account dashboard for compliance-related issues handled by another Amazon team.
• Customer Ask Alexa: This self-service tool lives on product pages to answer customer FAQs, though is only available to select groups in October 20222 as an invite-only program before expanding to all eligible sellers in 2023. Learn more about Alexa’s capabilities here.
• Pricing Health tool: With the pricing health tool, sellers can now view competitive pricing and see if any offers are at risk of being delisted due to non-competitive pricing. In addition, updates to this tool now allow sellers to bulk update pricing.

7. Amazon Global Logistics (STAR)

It’s no surprise that Amazon strives to provide opportunities for sellers to grow their business, which is why they launched the Marketplace Product Guidance for selling internationally. Recently enhanced to provide selection recommendations by identifying high-demand products, Marketplace Product Guidance can increase the likelihood of success globally, with automated pricing across all Amazon stores. 

The “List Once, Sell Globally” feature allows sellers to bulk upload products for global selling. Here’s how it works: 

1. Choose a template 
2. Select a product 
3. Select the marketplaces 
4. Generate template
5. Fill in template 
6. Voila! 

Behind the scenes, Amazon will purchase your inventory and ship the products to the appropriate fulfillment centers. On the shopper’s end, products will still be listed as “shipped from and sold by Amazon.” With this, sellers can leverage local fees rather than the cross-border remote fees. We can expect new listing language choices and additional global management tools to apply fixes across all marketplaces. 

8. Amazon Local Selling

Two new updates in the local selling category are BOPIS and Amazon Today. Buy Online Pick Up In-Store (BOPIS) is now available for sellers to utilize brick-and-mortar stores for local pickup, further connecting local sellers to shoppers. Amazon Today is geo-targeted to list your in-store inventory on Amazon and provides same-day delivery for shoppers.

9. Veeqo US Launch

Amazon announced the US launch of Veeqo, an inventory/shipping tool available to sellers at no cost. This multi-channel shipping software was built to help cut shipping costs while increasing the speed of fulfilling customer orders. Sellers can connect their sales channels (i.e., Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Shopify) and access discounted shipping rates on UPS, USPS, DHL and FedEx. You can read the official release here.

10. Seller Payment Services

Amazon introduced two new updates to improve the steps that sellers must take to transfer their funds from Amazon into the sellers’ bank account. 

• Amazon Seller Wallet: This digital wallet makes it easier for global sellers to hold, view, convert and transfer store proceeds from their US store directly into their bank accounts, all within Seller Central. Dive into how Amazon made it easier for sellers to manage their funds. 
• Express Payout: Provides sellers with the convenience of moving and receiving funds within 24 hours instead of the usual 3-5 business days. Learn more here.

Wrapping things up

The ecommerce space has been rapidly growing, and Amazon continues to lead the way with its commitment to improving both the seller and buyer’s shopping experience. In fact, Amazon went beyond providing better experiences for sellers as the new tools can help to increase customer lifetime value.

Want to see more from Amazon Accelerate? Don’t worry if you missed out; you can watch Day 1 highlights here and Day 2 highlights here. There was a lot to unpack at Amazon Accelerate 2022, but our team is eager to explore these new rollouts with you!