Prime Day 2023: Tips for Vendors & Sellers

Prime Day 2023: Timing & General Conditions

This year, Amazon Prime Day will take place on July 11 and 12. The two-day event period seems to have worked well for Amazon, as does a second “Prime Day” expected in October in 2023. In 2022, the deal event took place in October for the first time. The “Prime Early Access Sale” was designed to encourage shopping before Black Friday. However, the sales event lagged behind the regular Prime Day in terms of sales growth in 2022.

Our Amazon Shopper Report 2023, a nationally representative survey of 1,000 Britains from June 2023, shows the significance of Prime Day, especially this year. Two thirds of Britains who have already shopped on Amazon actively participate in deal events like Prime Day. 18 % even consciously save to take advantage of offers during the deal period! In addition, many of those surveyed say that they increasingly take advantage of offers and discount events in order to save money. The ideal conditions for Amazon Prime Day 2023!

Looking back: Prime Day 2022

If we take a look back at Prime Day 2022, the course of the deal event provides the first clues for a possible strategy this year. 

The first deal day generated a 435% increase in sales across Amazon marketplaces in the EU5, compared to an average day in the previous month. The second day saw a 359% increase. The first day of Prime Day 2022 was therefore significantly more successful than the second day.

This is also reflected in the advertising data; here, too, the first deal day was on average more successful than the second in terms of ad sales and impressions. However, the first day of Prime Day 2022 was also more competitive with a higher ad spend and higher CPCs – the Spanish Amazon Marketplace being the only exception.

Tips for Prime Day 2023

Most customers commit to purchasing on discount days instead of waiting longer for deals that might be even better – this was also the case with Prime Day 2022. We therefore recommend that brands on Amazon focus on the first deal day again this year.

In the following, we will go into how brand manufacturers can optimally prepare for the momentous event days, the key things to consider during preparation, throughout Prime Day and in the fallout.

Preparation for Prime Day

Selecting products for Prime Day deals

When selecting products for Prime Day Deals, vendors and sellers should ask themselves the following questions:

• Which of my bestsellers can be sales drivers during Prime Day?
• Which of my new products or products from the “long tail” can I promote during Prime Day and thus give them more visibility in the long term?

With Vendors, Amazon usually makes suggestions as to which products are suitable for Prime Day. These are sold to Amazon with a discount on the actual purchase price. Vendors should check these suggestions and determine whether they can reconcile the proposed discount with their margin and profit planning.

Prime Day is all about the exceptional deals on Amazon, which are also featured on the respective Amazon pages, giving them additional traffic. These deals usually have to give a minimum discount of 20%. Furthermore, there is the possibility of benefitting from the increased traffic on Amazon’s platform with “normal deals” such as Lightning Deals and Top Deals.

Checking Retail Readiness

Before products are advertised on Amazon, they should urgently be “retail ready”. In addition to SEO and mobile optimisation of the content on the PDP, this includes creating A+ content and having strong ratings. The retail readiness score can be easily calculated using Remdash. To determine the score, KPIs such as the length of the title, the number of bullet points and images as well as ratings and reviews are taken into account and weighted according to importance.

Check Availability And Buy Box Status

When selecting products for Prime Day deals and promotions, brands should also make sure that the ASINs are currently available and likely to be available for a longer period of time so that they do not run out of stock. In addition, brands should be in the Amazon Buy Box for the advertised products and should also be constantly checking during Prime Day that they do not lose the Buy Box. Both actions are possible with the corresponding widgets in our software solution, Remdash. Remdash also enables the setting of alerts that are triggered when the Buy Box status changes.

Creating Advertising Campaigns

Once the product selection has been made, advertising campaigns and deals can be created. Our tip: Start advertising even before Prime Day, as traffic on Amazon is already rising sharply. 

For all ad types, existing campaigns should be used instead of creating new ones. Due to historical data on the stored keywords, these perform better than newly created campaigns. For Sponsored Product ads, keywords such as “Deal” or “Prime Day” can also be inserted if offers are placed on these products. For Sponsored Brand ads, make sure that they lead to an offer page in the brand store.

Visibility Check for the Most Important Keywords

After creating the advertising campaigns, vendors and sellers should check whether their brand is visible on the paid placements for the most important keywords. If not, the campaigns need to be adjusted to prevent them from “getting lost” among the increased competition on Prime Day and to ensure the advertising budget is being used wisely.

Visibility can best be tracked using Share of Voice in a software tool. Amazon itself has recently started offering its own option to monitor the visibility of its own brand with the Brand Impression Share. However, this share is only available for paid placements and on a “single days/week” basis, so we recommend using an Amazon tool.

If the most important keywords are stored in the selected tool, the visibility of one’s own brand and the competition can be tracked for them at any time. If other sellers have a higher share of voice, it is possible to react by increasing budgets and bids.

Optimally, a distinction is made between the different keyword types:

• Generic keywords for the categories and products that are in focus on Prime Day
• Branded keywords, in order to check whether competitors occupy their own placements
• Possibly competitor keywords to “attack” other brands

Shortly before Prime Day: Last Minute Checks

Checking Content Accuracy 

Shortly before the start of the ad campaigns, brands should check once again whether the content of the advertised products looks as desired. Unauthorised changes to Amazon content happen again and again for various reasons and should be rectified quickly. This can be done with the Automated Content Protection from Remdash: With just a few clicks, the fully automated case upload takes place, which triggers the changes back to the desired content. 

Brands should keep an eye on content accuracy during the entire deal period in order to be able to react quickly in case of deviations.

Setting up a Dashboard

As early as possible, brand manufacturers should create a Prime Day dashboard to track their most important KPIs and to immediately recognise if something is not going according to plan. We also use our Amazon tool, Remdash, for this and coordinate the dashboards individually from the corresponding widgets.

During Prime Day

Monitoring the Deals

After all the preparatory work, the most important task during Prime Day is to check whether the posted deals are live as planned. We check this with the Deal Availability & Trend widgets in Remdash and keep track of ongoing and planned deals at all times.

Monitoring of all Relevant KPIs

During Prime Day, the previously created dashboard is used. All relevant KPIs should now be monitored at all times in order to make necessary adjustments: For example, if the focus of advertising campaigns is to be shifted to other ASINs or the budget is to be increased in order to push well-performing keywords even more. The KPIs checked in advance, such as the availability of the advertised products, the ownership of the Buy Box and the Share of Voice, should also continue to be tracked.

Pro-tip: Short-term reaction is key during Prime Day! If monitoring competitor products has been started early, it is possible to take advantage of their out-of-stock situation.

After Prime Day

Performance Analysis

The end of one deal event is the start of the next deal event! After Prime Day, the performance of the campaigns and deals should be analysed with the dashboard. This is because important learnings can be generated for upcoming deal events such as Black Friday. From our point of view, it is particularly relevant to check how much the deals sustainably improve the performance of the products in terms of ranking, visibility and thus sales. For this purpose, it is worth comparing advertised and non-advertised products or products with and without a deal. In our experience, the effects are noticeable and measurable in the long term – this makes participation in Prime Day worthwhile for sellers, looking to invest in the future of their business.

Extending Ad Campaigns

In addition, ad campaigns that are still running well can simply be extended beyond Prime Day! Plus, newly acquired customers can be addressed again via retargeting campaigns.

Conclusion: Data as the basis for a successful Prime Day 2023

Data, data, data: In order to make good decisions on Amazon, data must be collected and evaluated. It is the same before, during and after Prime Day: the more data that is available, ideally in advance, the more accurately performance can be predicted, and the better focus products can be selected and budgets allocated. The analysis after Prime Day is therefore of particular importance, because this is when the learnings for the next deal event are generated.