May 31, 2021

How to Prepare for Amazon Prime Day 2022: The Complete Guide

Ever since Amazon launched Prime Day back in 2015, it has been one of the most anticipated annual shopping events.

Prime Day traditionally comes sometime in July, but this year is anything but ordinary, and according to Amazon, the next Prime Day will start a month earlier than usual, on June 21—22, 2022.

As the name suggests, the shopping spree is only available to Amazon Prime members. Back in 2020, Amazon reported having over 200 million paying customers.

Source: Statista

In 2021, Prime Day led to $11.2 billion worth of sales on Amazon—that’s a 7.7% rise from the previous year’s $10.4 billion. And since each year we see an upward trend in both the Prime customer base and sales, we can anticipate larger numbers for 2022.

This means that any seller will want to capitalize on those ready-to-buy shoppers and come up with an irresistible special deal.

This quick guide to preparing for Amazon Prime Day will walk you through the key steps that will help you create a great Prime Day offer—from learning how to maximize profits to the most efficient promotional tools that will help you stand out from the ever-growing competition.

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What is Prime Day?

As the Keyword Wizard tool suggests, “What is Amazon Prime Day” is the most popular Prime Day-related question people Google.

As you can guess from the name, Amazon Prime Day was designed as a one-day global shopping event reserved only for Amazon Prime members. It is now extended to two days and, similar to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s filled with mind-blowing discounts and bargains.

This simply means that Amazon Prime members get two extra days of huge sales that no other customers have access to.

In fact, search data from the Keyword Wizard tool even reflects that over the past few years, cumulative searches for Prime Day exceeded those of Black Friday—in 2019, Prime Day attracted 20% more interest from Google surfers; in 2020, the numbers were even.

But it’s not just a big deal for shoppers. Amazon sellers take this day as an opportunity to boost sales and their revenue. The only question is how. And this we’ll address in the next part.

How to Prepare for Amazon Prime Day: Quick Recommendations

1. Check Your Stock Level and Supply Chains

If you anticipate that you will have trouble maintaining stock levels, we recommend that you do not discount your products for Prime Day. While, of course, you'll want to maximize your Prime Day sales, you'll also want to avoid potential stock-outs of your product that could allow your competitors to gain long-term advantages in the search rankings.

Remember to also verify supply chains for product packaging and shipping. We have been seeing an increase in manufacturers struggling to maintain packaging supply chains for their products, and longer lead times to manufacture their products.

2. Send Additional Goods

If you have adequate stock, especially if you plan to offer a discount, send in additional products to ensure stock levels. If you usually send your items to Amazon's FBA warehouses via Less Than Truckload (LTL) shipments, you may want to consider small parcel (UPS) or Full Truck Load (FTL) shipments to restock after Prime Day 2022.

Remember: it is important that you manage your inventory for oversupply as well as potential stock-outs.

3. Add a Coupon

If you have adequate stock levels, adding a clippable coupon can help provide the "sale" experience at a low cost. Coupons are 60 cents per redemption and show in the search results and most ads.

We recommend you create and test your coupons well before Prime Day.

Internally, we are encouraging all brands to have their clippable coupons created as soon as possible. Amazon sent out a communication to some sellers with instructions to have coupons featured if they were set by May 28th with specific placeholder dates. The minimum discount to be featured was 20%.

4. Review Your Ad Strategy and Budgets

Now is the time to ensure your ad campaigns are optimized, and that you have identified whether you want to increase or decrease your ad budget for Prime Day.

With so much emphasis on Prime Day, many other advertisers will temporarily increase their bids and budgets. This means that without adjusting your strategies, your campaigns might run out of budget earlier in the day. Additionally, keyword phrases that are only marginally profitable may be bid up to where the cost is prohibitive.

5. Add a Merchant Fulfilled Offer

If you anticipate high sales during this period, we recommend that you create an additional MSKU on your products with an MF offer. This allows you to ship additional products from your location to prevent stock-outs.

As Prime Day approaches, it is not uncommon for Amazon to limit the ability of sellers to create new promotions. This is most common with lightning deals; however, we also saw that Amazon limited the creation of coupons during the lockdowns.

It is important that you take time today to review your ad strategies and get your promotions for Prime Day and Black Friday up as quickly as possible.

6. Check Optimization of Your Listings

Sellers typically see an influx of visitors during Prime Day. And this means that you have to make a great first impression. In the Amazon-verse, this implies having a top-notch product listing.

Take time to finesse your listing—from keyword optimization to high-quality images, your visitors 'will initially judge your product by its look. But then, they’ll dig into the details, so perfect your product description and fix any listing issues before shoppers notice them.

We’ve looked at the top-performing product listings on Amazon and pinpointed the key best practices that turn your listing into a bestseller. Make sure to follow some of the patterns listed in this article.

If you are reading this just a few weeks before Prime Day, give your product listing a quick fix by measuring its quality with the Listing Quality Check tool for Amazon.

7. Keep Your Pricing Competitive

Of course, from a consumer standpoint, Prime Day is all about savings. Sellers, however, are always thinking of profits. And this conundrum is especially obvious during hot discount seasons.

On Prime Day, however, sellers can prioritize sales volumes over margins. Although competitive pricing means higher sales volumes but lower profits, you can achieve a few dividends that go beyond revenue:

  • A greater number of product reviews
  • Higher brand awareness
  • A boost in your rankings thanks to higher sales (Amazon factors in the number of sales in its A9 ranking algo)

You can use tools like Keepa to keep watch on competitors’ pricing strategies and try to match them if you can afford to.

8. Unleash the Full Potential of Non-Amazon Platforms

While your competitors are stepping on each other’s toes trying to self-promote on Amazon itself, you can think outside the box and leverage external platforms.

As you can see from the Keyword Wizard data we shared above, people Google Prime Day too. And this means that you can launch Google Ads or social media ads instead of getting overwhelmed by high Amazon PPC costs during the season.

This post reveals the top 5 ways to drive external traffic to your Amazon listing—just take some platform ideas and start setting up your strategy before the date approaches!

If you don’t anticipate a significant spike in demand for your particular product category—either you have prior experience or checked the previous year’s search stats, don’t get completely discouraged.

Amazon can be a goldmine for new product ideas in itself.

Make sure to check out the “Best Sellers”, “New Releases”, and “Movers & Shakers” product categories right within Amazon to see the most trending and hot products right now!

Then, ask yourself—can your product complement the current trendy item? Can you quickly roll out sales for a new up-and-coming product? If the answer to the first question is “yes”, tweak your product listing’s content to mention the popular item.

10. Unload Your Out-Of-Season Products

Yes, Prime Day is great for selling the hottest products. Shoppers wait for large-discount seasons to purchase their long-desired goods.

Thanks to the intel from Keyword Wizard, we checked what last year’s Prime Day “wish-list” looked like:

But even if you aren’t dealing with the most trending products, Prime Day can be a good excuse to unload some of your less in-demand items.

Impulsive shoppers and bargain hunters are all a part of the Amazon Prime Day deal, so you might actually have a chance to get rid of your out-of-season products. Because people often turn to big sales weeks to buy products they’ve long waited to buy throughout the year, seasonality might not play a big role in this case.

Leverage Amazon-Native Prime Day Tools

While you should absolutely try all the tips we shared above, you have some Amazon-native tools designed specifically for getting you Prime Day ready.

All the tools we’ll list can be found on your Amazon Seller Central page under the Advertising section within the drop-down menu.

1. Prime-Exclusive Discounts

Find the “Create Discount” section and launch one or a few Prime Exclusive Discounts—they will only be shown to Prime members and will be featured during the big discount day.

This will help users benchmark the typical quoted price against a discount and make a quick assessment of the value of the special deal.

The Prime Exclusive Discounts Creation Page lists some criteria you must meet in order to qualify for the Exclusive Discounts program:

  • Your discounted item has to be a nationally Prime shipping eligible FBA product.
  • You must have at least a 3.5-star rating or no rating at all.
  • You must discount at least 20% off the non-Prime member non-promotional price.
  • The discount must be at max 80% off the non-Prime member non-promotional price.
  • You as a seller should have a Seller Feedback Rating of at least 4 (when available). Amazon takes your rating average for the past 365 days if you have 10+ ratings during that period; if you don’t, Amazon takes your lifetime average rating.
  • The exclusive discounted price must be below the lowest price for the ASIN in the last 30 days by 5.0%.

2. Prime Day Coupons

In the same fashion, find the “Create a new coupon” section that enables you to create one voucher at a time, or you can use a spreadsheet to add vouchers in bulk.

Customers can click on these coupons when they add your item to the cart and the discount will appear at the checkout stage.

Similar to the requirements we mentioned above, you have to meet certain eligibility criteria to get access to coupons.

What to Do After Prime Day, or Can You Sit Back and Relax Once It’s Over?

Now that you know how to get ready to savor the full benefits of Prime Day, you should also consider your post-event to-do list. Because as much as Prime Day can be one of the most tiring seasons for Amazon sellers, your job isn’t over the next day.

So, before you can finally sit back and enjoy the fruits of your efforts, make sure to take these four steps:

1.  Change your prices

Once the shopping craze is over, you don’t have to go that low on the pricing. Take a look at competing listings, of course, but you can generally increase your prices, returning them to ‘normal’ levels.

Keep in mind, though, that sellers typically face a post Prime Day dip in demand (people bought what they needed during the two shopping-intensive days), so you can also check products that didn’t sell well during Prime Day. Maybe they need to be priced down so you can initiate a sort of clearance to clear out your inventory.

2. Adjust your Amazon Prime Day advertising campaigns

Once Prime Day is over, you can return your advertising efforts back to normal. But make sure to revisit your strategy, especially if you made significant adjustments for the event—check your campaign performance, costs, bidding strategies, and, of course, calculate final costs.

3. Check your inventory

Chances are, things didn’t go exactly as planned during Prime Day. So, you might need to correct any inventory issues before they hit you. Replace understocked products to pre-empt potential sales losses. Change pricing for underperforming items that are overstocked to avoid having to pay Amazon storage fees.

4. Measure the efficiency of your efforts

As with any campaign—and your Prime Day efforts can all be counted as a part of one campaign—you have to assess your performance. And it’s not just for the purpose of reporting or anything else—it will help you shape a better strategy for the next Prime Day.

While each seller will have their own metrics to measure, you should be able to answer a simple few questions straight after your Prime Day campaigns:

  • What worked? What didn’t work?
  • What are my profit margins?
  • Which items performed really well, and which ones lagged behind?
  • What could I do to ensure smarter inventory?
  • Did I get all the extra perks I anticipated (reviews, rankings boost, etc.)?

If you can answer all of these questions, you can say that you’ve made the most of Amazon Prime Day, even if your profits didn’t skyrocket. Because next time, they will!

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Read further:

Read this post to learn about the anatomy of a best-selling Amazon listing—to know which parts of your listing to tweak first and how. Make sure to go through this extensive guide that will walk you through the key steps to seeing top results on Amazon.