What’s up, guys?
The most exciting time of the year is coming around, Christmas! Especially for us Amazon sellers this is going to be huge. Around 40% of all my sales in the year come in the last 2 months!
Last year, I gave you 5 tips to help you prepare for the holiday shopping season. This year, I want to start early and give you a rundown of my Q4 schedule with all the important dates and deadlines!
My Q4 Sales Last year
10th of November: Stock up!
During Q4 you will see a huge delay when it comes to incoming stock to the Amazon FBA warehouses. Everybody is trying to send in their products at the last moment and all the trucking companies & warehouse workers are extremely busy.
To avoid this I always aim to have all my units in stock before the 10th of November. You don’t want to schedule a delivery appointment on 20th of November, find out there is a 2-week delay and miss out on Black Friday & Cyber Monday!
20th of November: Q4 Preparation time
About a week before Black Friday I will start to prepare my listings, fine-tune my PPC campaigns. I will highly advise to take a look at my 5 tips to prepare for Black Friday on Amazon where I go into more detail about this.
I also like to lower my price a week before Black Friday. This is not going to hurt me a lot in terms of profit, as the sales are pretty low this month. But what this is going to do is going to shoot me up the rankings.
As we all know: More sales -> Higher Ranking. So a week before Black Friday I like to drop my prices, this way I will have more sales than my competitors that week, after which Amazon will increase my rankings.
Than once Black Friday & the Holiday Shopping spree starts I am ranking nice an high and ready to increase my prices again.
27 November: Thanksgiving
Last day to check if you have everything set up right:
- Have you uploaded Christmas-style pictures to all of your listings?
- Do you have a competitive price?
- Are you happy with your PPC campaign? Have you set a daily budget?
29 November: Black Friday
This is the start of the Christmas Holiday Shopping season! On this day you will see a huge increase in sales. Last year I had more than double the number of sales compared to the day before!
2 December: Cyber Monday
Cyber Monday is even bigger than Black Friday. Expect even more sales and watch your PPC campaigns! You will run out of budget real quick with this many visitors. So make sure to increase your daily budget if you are happy with the ACOS!
Week of 10 – 17 December: Biggest Sales Week of the Year!
For me, this was when the majority of the holiday sales came in. Especially at the end of this week, is when people are running out of time to buy Christmas presents. I had my biggest day on the 17th of December, where I sold 745 units and made $4,789 profit in a single day.
25 December: Christmas – Time to re-order!
By this point you will probably be full of joy at your Christmas dinner, counting all the money you made in the last 2 months. Thinking about taking a nice long vacation! Well not really.. This is also the deadline for when you need to place your next order.
If you have done everything right you should be very low on stock at this point. Or possibly even be completely sold out. It is very important that you place your new order before Christmas! As a typical order in China will take 30 days and Chinese New Year will start in exactly 30 days from this point!
25th of January: Start of Chinese New Year
At this point, you have to make sure that all of your Chinese orders have been manufactured and are currently being shipped. The entire country of China will stop working after this point.
