Emerging tide raises all boats: Get ready for Amazon High Day
It’s estimated Prime Day brought in between $1.8 billion and $2.8 billion dollars for Amazon in 2017. The e-commerce giant raked in more sales in a single day than ever in its history, surpassing even Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Prime Day is even credited with moving up the back to school shopping season by almost a full month. With Amazon Prime Day for this year pending announcement, how can sellers ensure they are setup to capitalize and execute on this opportunity?
Get Prime eligibility on Amazon
If you are selling through Amazon Marketplace, scaling your Amazon business to handle volume spikes can be a challenge for living up to the two day promise to Prime members. One way to list Prime products and handle volume spikes is to leverage Fulfill by Amazon (as outlined in previous blog about Amazon Marketplace and Amazon Retail). With Fulfill by Amazon, ensuring you have enough products in Amazon Fulfillment Centers is vital to maximizing the sales opportunity. To keep an eye on sales and inventory in real time to respond quickly to new demand, automating Fulfill by Amazon orders with your inventory and financials system is a must.
Another way for your products to obtain Prime eligibility is by being a Prime approved Amazon seller. Sellers fulfilling orders must go through a trial period to demonstrate excellence in fulfillment and customer service. The trial period lasts between 5 and 90 days, depending on when you meet the performance requirements for 200 Prime trial orders. The performance requirements include maintaining an On-Time Shipment Rate of at least 99%, with use of Buy Shipping Services for at least 95% and a cancellation rate of no more than 1% of Prime trial orders. To increase your confidence to maintain performance requirements under peak volumes during Amazon Prime Day, sellers should consider automating the fulfillment process.
Finally, vendors selling direct to Amazon are by default Prime eligible when resold by Amazon. These vendors benefit from the large volumes and can seek out Amazon to establish promotions for Prime Day. To ensure there is enough volume to handle the demand, vendors may be asked to drop ship on behalf of Amazon as well.
Not on Amazon? There’s still hope
Even the retailers who are not on Amazon can sometimes see a bump during Amazon Prime Day. Occasionally, online shoppers will browse Amazon and decide to look elsewhere for that same product. Maybe they’re price shopping, maybe they can’t find the color or style they want. Regardless, history has shown that other online retailers have seen their own sales bumps on Prime Day, so it could be worth it to offer deals on your own e-commerce site to snag those shopping carts, even if you aren’t yet Amazon Prime-ready.
Clearly, though, having your products Prime-eligible and available on Amazon when the big day hits is the greatest advantage for retailers and suppliers to ride the Amazon wave. No matter what channel you use to sell on Amazon, be prepared for Prime Day. You can connect to a single network that can communicate with your Amazon business, consolidating your channels for a single vantage point.
Whether you want to sell products on Amazon, through a different Marketplace or any other network of retailers or suppliers, EDI Here can help you find a solution. To learn more about our cloud-based software solutions for retailers, suppliers, and third-party logistics providers, please contact an EDI representative today.
