A few days ago Amazon sent out a reminder to Start Preparing for Amazon Prime Day 2016!

While most of the action will be toward the bigger resellers who received invitations to propose a Prime Day promotion, the fact is, Prime Day generates a lot more traffic to Amazon, which is good for everybody! According to Amazon, sales were up 93%, and social media mentions were up 50% compared to the 30-day average. Full disclosure, those social media mentions were not all positive, but, as they say in marketing: any publicity is good publicity.

Here’s the part, looking back that struck me the most courtesy of Techcrunch:

Amazon customers ordered 34.4 million items across Prime-eligible countries, the retailer reports, breaking all Black Friday records with 398 items ordered per second.

Let me re-emphasize that: 398 items ordered per second. My friends, I have a hard time believing that all those items are lightning deals. More likely, the lightning and Prime Day deals draw folks in, and then they get to looking around. “Hmm, when was the last time I ordered coffee? dog food? Ooh, look at that iPad, it looks like a good deal, why not?” The logic can go on. Here’s an example from Amazon of what was sold:

Amazon Prime Day 2015 – Sold Examples

Preparing for Amazon Prime Day

So what can you do to prepare? First, have all your stock into Amazon by 22 June 2016. Second, if you didn’t have Amazon ask you if you’d like to participate in a Prime Day promotion, that ship has sailed. However, having stock of anything you typically sell, in Amazon’s warehouses, and on sale is going to be key. The next question is: How close are you to the buy box? Figure that if the various tools, like ASINSpector say there are x sales per month, the conservative approach would be to divide those sales by 30 and then check competitor inventory. Example below:

Use data like this, to determine your price. I would posit: If your desired price is within 10-20% of the buy box price, don’t change your price, unless there are sellers (either in quantity or high inventory) inside of 10% of the buy box price. With a breakout event like Amazon Prime Day, you could even go further outside of that range and still get decent sales.

Wrapping Up

Amazon Prime Day is a big deal. Various articles compare it to Black Friday — which is ironic, considering the conventional wisdom would say that Cyber Monday would be a bigger day. Long story short. This is like a rehearsal for the Fourth Quarter (Q4). The beauty of Amazon Prime day however, is that it is not necessarily about what is the hottest toy or gadget, I would argue, it is more about what folks want or need at the given time that they happen to click on Amazon.

Were you an Amazon Seller last year? Did you find the day to be better than the rest of January?

My Amazon Prime Day 2014 – for example