Although it’s only September, it’s time to start thinking of how to set up your page for the holidays. As an eCommerce merchant, you don’t have the luxury of thinking about Christmas at the beginning of December — you have to start getting ready now. For many people, thinking of the holidays before the temperature dips below freezing just isn’t right, but there’s an awful lot of work that goes into stocking your virtual shelves. And with sales spiking during the holiday season, read on to learn what you can do to benefit from that (hint: repricing is one of them).
Go With Fulfilment by Amazon, If You’re Not Already
We oh-so-briefly mentioned before about how sales will spike around Christmas time; this is a bit of an understatement — Christmas sales are the highest ones of the year, and woe be to any merchant who can’t handle the load. If you get way more orders than you were expecting and can’t deliver on your promise of X days shipping, not only will you have grumpy customers on your hands, but you’ll have buyers ready to offer negative feedback which will affect your status as a quality seller.
This is why it only makes sense to invest in Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) during the holidays, if not all the time. Amazon hires thousands of extra hands to help out with the sorting, packing, organising, scanning and delivering, all so you don’t have to worry about a thing.
Even more, if you’re the type of merchant who does a decent amount of volume on Amazon, using FBA can be a neat way to take on even more orders than normal so you can really capitalise on the holiday rush.
Ditch the Price War
In a price war, the only person who wins is the buyer, and that’s at the cost of slowly killing off merchants. When your primary concern is lowering your price until your inventory is cheaper than you competitor’s, then you’re taking valuable time away from actually growing your business in a quality way: putting your customers first. That’s where repricing software can help a lot despite the many common myths about using such software.
Depending on what you sell, you’ll have an easier or harder time avoiding a price war. If it’s something in electronics that has a brand name attached to it (e.g. iPods, Kindles, etc.), then it’s pretty easy to stick with a minimum advertised price. But if it’s merchandise in other categories, then you’ll have to think about implementing clever repricing rules and amping up the prestige attached to it or using some of the features we’ll discuss next.
Toss in Promotions and Goodies
The most basic way of expressing your goal on Amazon is to move an increasing number of products. Sounds simple, right? In theory it is, but actually getting consumers to open their wallets a little further can be tricky.
That is, of course, unless you offer them a pretty sweet deal for doing so. If you’ve ever gone into any store during the holidays, you’ll notice just how rife they are with specials, promotions and giveaways. So, why not take a page out of their books?
There are so many different ways you can apply this to your game that you’re only limited by your creativity and imagination:
- Cross-selling
- Upselling
- Cheaply-priced doohickeys to qualify for free shipping
- Free shipping, full stop
- Free gift with X amount of money spent
- Personalised package
- Bundling
- Extra roll of gift wrap
All you have to do is figure out which one(s) would work best for you on your Amazon listings, and which ones work better on your ecommerce store!
Final Thoughts
One thing we’re confident will work for everyone is using our repricing software. It’s ridiculously simple to use—all that’s required is inputting your min and max values and watching how your competitors try and catch up. But best of all — and this is the part we here at RepricerExpress like best — it’s free for your first 15 days and comes with a Safe Mode so you can try repricing without affecting your live Amazon prices.
