It’s almost the most wonderful time of the year! Especially for us Amazon sellers! Q4, Christmas season baby! 1 more month until Black Friday & Cyber Monday, the start of the holiday shopping season on Amazon!
Last year I did 38% of all my sales in the last 2 months of the year. So yeah, I am pretty excited for this years Christmas.
If this is your first Q4 on Amazon; GET HYPED! Even if you are not selling typical present type of products, your sales will still skyrocket! Here are my top 5 tips to prepare for Black Friday / Christmas Holiday Shopping Season on Amazon 2018.
Amazon Black Friday 2018: November 23
Amazon Cyber Monday 2018: November 26
1). Stock up!
Make sure you have enough stock to survive the holiday season! Last year my best selling product ran out of stock on December 13th and I missed out on a huge amount of sales.
As a rough estimation I forecast x3 sales in November and x4 sales in December. And this is for normal products! If you are selling toys you should sell around x5 – x8 the amount of what you normally sell in November & December! You can also use Google Trends to check how much the search popularity will increase for your product during Christmas.
If you are planning to ship LTL shipments to Amazon, make sure to ship them early. Amazon warehouse is usually extremely hectic around Christmas season and you can expect a lot of receiving delay ( especially for LTL Shipments ).
2). Watch the prices!
During the Christmas season the product prices from your competitors will greatly vary! Some will run huge promo’s, drastically drop their price. While others may increase the price because they are almost running out of stock. It is your job to monitor these prices and adjust accordingly.
For example: If you are normally selling a garlic press for $15, just like all your competitors. But on 15 December you check your competitors pricing and see all of them have raised the price to $25. Then you would be stupid if you kept your price at $15. You can easily raise your price to $19,99 and still be the cheapest option out there! You can use camelcamelcamel.com to check out how the price of your competitors changed last Q4.
3). Christmas style photo’s!
I only do this for my top selling products, as it is a bit of an investment. On your main image you can only show your product on a white background. But on the other images you can add all kinds of text & props. So I will do everything in my power to bring the Christmas feeling to my customers via these photo’s.
I will have my photographer reshoot my products, Christmas style! I will then have my designer add some nice Christmas effects ( Bells, Streamers, etc ). With this I hope to convey my customer into thinking this will be the perfect Christmas gift! As soon as they see my product they will think about Christmas!
4). Go hard on PPC
Expect to spend a lot on PPC! My goal is to have all my PPC campaigns optimised to the fullest! So I can remove the daily budget and maximise the amount of PPC sales. Last year I left the daily budget, and all of my campaigns reached their daily cap in no-time. Again, this caused a big loss in potential sales. If you have not optimised your PPC campaigns yet, you can check out my PPC tutorial.
5). Lightning Deals
I usually don’t run Lightning Deals, as I barely have enough stock to survive Christmas. But I know some people who have sold a crazy amount by running Lightning deals during the shopping season. It is also a great way to get rid of slow moving SKU’s.
Lightning Deals for Black Friday & Cyber Monday are already closed. But you can still enrol in for the Lightning Deals in Holiday season week 1 ( enrolment closed 25 Nov) , 2 ( enrolment closed 2 Dec) & 3 ( enrolment closed 9 Nov).
Lightning deal requirements
- Reviews: 3-star rating or above.
- Variations: If you are running variations you have to include 65% of all the variations.
- Seller feedback: You must have a minimum of 5 ratings per month.
- Cost: $300 per deal.
Thank you so much for your helpful content! I’m a first time seller but I’ve been researching for a long time and we finally pulled the trigger. We just placed our order and our order should be at Amazon’s warehouse by December 1. Is that ok? Will Amazon turn away our products because we are first time sellers? I think I heard somewhere that they are really strict with Q4. Any input would help. Thanks in advance
I think there are only restrictions in Q4 if you are selling toys. If not you should be fine.
Thanks for the blog. I am planning to sell jewelry through FBA in box with my tag. My question is there are different dealers on alibaba for jewelry, tags and boxes. So what is best way to send this all (jewelry tagged and boxed) from different suppliers to Amazon FBA?
Thanks again!
Probably best by ocean freight. Although if you want it fast & if it is really light & small you might want to consider air express
Would you recommend the JungleScout WebApp or Chrome Extension if you can only afford one starting out. I do not have a product idea yet. Thanks.
Start with the chrome extension. IMO this is a must. You can check out my checklist on what to look for in a new product idea. And start brainstorming. Think about stuff that you use, in your house, at work, etc. If you really can’t find any product idea’s, save up and get the WebApp.
By the way; there is a $20 discount coupon for the chrome extension you can use