With the holidays quickly approaching and sales on Amazon are on the rise, you want to make sure your Amazon store is prepared for those last-minute gift shoppers. Although you’ve already built your brand’s strategy for holiday Amazon sales, we put together a holiday eCommerce checklist for you—just in case you forgot anything. Whether it’s preparing your store in general, choosing promotions, driving traffic to your store, or on-site advertising, we’ve got you covered. So here’s your list, and be sure to check it twice.

Preparation

Chance favors the prepared, and your Amazon store will have increased conversions during the bustling holiday season if the items below are in order.

Reviews and responses

Shopping online is more social than ever, and is crucial to a successful Amazon listing. Think about the last time you bought something on Amazon. Did you look at the amount of reviews and the star rating? Reviews can make or break the success of your listing, so make sure you are constantly on top of responding to reviews and have a strategy in place. Furthermore, make sure your brand has responded to the positive and negative reviews on your listings. This shows shoppers that your brand stands behind its products, and that your store is responsive and trustworthy.

SEO optimization

The quality of your listings’ SEO will determine how easy it is for shoppers to find your product. You can see our full blog post on how to optimize your brand’s SEO on Amazon here, but for now, here are a few quick tips:

‍Tip #1: Use as many relevant terms as possible for your listing if to boost your visibility, sales and overall rank in search results. You have 250 characters at your disposal for each listing, so use as many relevant keywords for your product as possible.

‍Tip #2: Your product listing title is the most important part of your listing. Amazon best practices suggest you include the following in the title: - Brand - Product line - Material or key feature - Product type - Color - Size - Packaging/Quantity

‍Tip #3: Put the most important keywords in your title first. Product titles usually have between 115-144 characters, depending on the category. However, Amazon listing titles on mobile only have 55-63. In order to hook those mobile shoppers, you’ll want to be strategic about what information you include in the first 55-63 characters.

Stock up for increased demand

Although selling out might sound nice at first, it means your business is missing out on more opportunities to make sales. Make sure your store has enough inventory to satisfy the higher holiday demand. Two great ways to do this are to understand how Amazon promotions work, and if you sell using Fulfillment by Amazon, check your inventory to make sure it’s reserved for Black Friday sales and other holiday promotions.

Advertising restructuring

It’s smart to regularly measure the effectiveness of your brand’s advertising strategy. Competitive, Automatic, Branded, and Non-Branded ads are all good strategies. These types of campaigns are easily measured and changes can be made effectively.

Promotions

From the beginning of November through January, shoppers visit Amazon expecting to find good deals and promotions. Nobody does deals quite as well as Amazon, and there are many options to consider and choose from on the platform.

Lightning Deals

Nothing sells better than creating urgency and offering a discount. Amazon’s Lightning Deals do just this. A Lightning Deal is a time-bound, promotional offer where a product is featured for a limited number of hours (usually 4 to 12 hours), on the Amazon Deals page. If you want to learn how to become eligible for Lightning Deals as a seller, check out this article.

Seller Powered Coupons

One of the more popular features for Amazon sellers is the SPC (Seller Powered Coupons). These virtual coupons give shoppers a dollar amount or percentage discount on the regular price of a product. In return, sellers get boosted visibility and exposure for that product—and more sales.

Promo Codes

The savvy shopper is always on the lookout for promotions, and promo codes through Amazon can be a powerful tool—if used wisely. Promo codes can be incorporated in giveaways, external traffic programs, and on detail pages. There are many ways to encourage shoppers to save money and buy during the holiday season, and Amazon provides sellers with plenty of options to choose from.

Amazon programs

There are a plethora of ways to advertise your products on Amazon using tools that are built into Amazon Advertising and other features. If you want to snag as much holiday retail action as possible, it would be worth going over your strategy for the following tools.

Amazon Advertising

Formerly AMS (Amazon Marketing Services), AMG (Amazon Media Group), and AAP (Amazon Advertising Platform), Amazon Advertising offers sellers helpful tools to stand out against the competition and boost traffic to product detail pages and brand pages. This collection of tools helps you advertise products in several places, including headline search ads, product display ads, sponsored products ads, and off-platform advertising (desktop display ads, mobile banner ads, and mobile interstitial ads). It’s important to curate a strategy for promoting your brand’s products during the holidays.

Posts

Amazon now has a social media-esque platform of their very own all about product discovery. Although Posts is still gaining traction, this newcomer is great news for retailers, offering a new way to promote your products via content you can repurpose from social media. One reason Amazon is so successful is because they’ve made it easy for sellers to advertise on their platform. With all of the options they offer, it won’t be hard to pick a few that will work for your brand’s strategy during the holiday season.

External traffic

When shoppers aren’t directly browsing on Amazon’s site, how are they going to learn about your products? That is where your brand’s external traffic strategy should come into play, and it would be wise to nail down your plan if you want to make the most of holiday retail. There are many creative ways to drive traffic to your products on Amazon, and here are a few to consider using in your holiday marketing strategy.

Social Advertising

People are spending more time on social media than ever before. When thinking about your brand’s marketing strategy, go to where the people are—and that is on social. This holiday season, consider sponsoring some advertising on Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram.

Influencer Advertising

Few things are more powerful than a solid third-party testimonial, and that is where influencer advertising comes into play. Combining an influencer’s voice with a special promotion is one option for the holidays, but with influencer marketing, there are endless opportunities for collaboration and promotions.

YouTube Advertising

When it comes to influencing purchase behavior, YouTube is an excellent option for reaching your key customers. Not only does YouTube have enormous reach, it also has advanced targeting options and their platform makes it easy to track ad metrics.

Website Support

Amazon is such a trusted place to make purchases that shoppers are increasingly choosing to purchase through Amazon than brand websites. One way to keep a customer interested when they are browsing your website is to give them opportunities to also view your products on Amazon. Redirecting people to Amazon from your website will ensure your brand doesn’t lose a sale if a shopper is more interested in purchasing on Amazon.

There are many things to consider and refine before the holiday retail season is upon us, and we know it might seem a little daunting. If you want the help of Pattern's Amazon and eCommerce experts to tighten up your last-minute holiday eCommerce checklist, you’re in luck. You can learn more about how to win during the holiday season on Amazon (and more) by filling out the form below.