The 2017 holiday season is swiftly approaching. This is a wonderful time of year to really shift your Private Label Amazon store into high gear. Whether sales are good or in need of improvement, it will benefit you immensely to get your store ready.
Holiday Calendar
Here are the key dates to keep in mind as we head toward the holidays and you plan for Q4:
- Thanksgiving: November 23, 2017
- Black Friday: November 24, 2017
- Chanukah: December 12 to 20, 2017
- Christmas: December 25, 2017
- Boxing Day: December 26, 2017
- Kwanzaa: December 26, 2017 to January 1, 2018
- New Year’s Eve: December 31, 2017
- Returns, returns, returns! (also, credits and gift cards): The entire month of January, 2018
- Chinese New Year: February 15 to 21, 2018
- Amazon Long-Term Storage Fee Assessment Day: February 15, 2018
Black Friday and Cyber Monday
In order to take advantage of the massive amount of Amazon customers that will be shopping the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, make sure you ship your FBA stock to arrive at Amazon’s fulfillment centers by November 7th. If you’re late with your shipments, you’ll miss out on the chance to participate. This will really hurt your store.
In the same vein, it would be foolish not to offer discounts during these sale days to incentivize Amazon shoppers to buy from your store. Shoppers expect Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, so don’t leave them in the dust! Be sure to check your inventory for products you can offer as Lightning Deals. Here’s how:
Navigate to your Seller Central dashboard. Under “Advertising,” select “Lightning Deals.” On this page, a list of Amazon recommended products from your store will be displayed. Not all products are available for listing as Lightning Deals. Generally, the product must:
- Have at least a 3-star rating (subject to change)
- Have variations available (the more, the merrier!)
- Be in an eligible category (offensive material, medicine, baby formula, adult products, and other categories are ineligible)
- Be Prime eligible (FBA or Merchant-fulfilled Network Prime)
- Be in New condition
In addition, only Professional Sellers are eligible to create Lightning Deals, and the recommendations change every week, so keep checking!
Sponsored Products
To have your listings appear on page 1 of search results as well as within individual product listing pages, you can invest in Sponsored Products. It’s Amazon’s PPC advertising program. If you know how to properly set up your ad campaigns (and, if you don’t, check out our previous blog posts here and here), Sponsored Products can be quite profitable during the holiday season. Check out the Average ROAS (return on ad spend) results from the 2015 Amazon holiday season:
For every $1 spent on a Sponsored Products ad campaign from Black Friday to Mid-December, an average of $12.67 profit was generated. That’s a lot of moolah, so get on board and carefully craft your holiday campaign!
We all love success in our business ventures, and an increase in holiday sales is a great way to help your Amazon Private Label store become successful. If you’re new to the game, or you need a little help, head on over to our 5 Day Fast Track Bootcamp to Private Labeling Training Series. We’ll get you started on the path to success before the end of next week!
