One of the biggest sales event of the year is on the horizon and approaching rapidly. Amazon Prime Day is the yearly promotion where Amazon reduces prices on a wide-ranging selection of items for its Prime membership customers. According to Amazon, in 2017, Amazon Prime Day sales surpassed Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales globally, with sales growing more than 60% from 2016, making it the biggest day in Amazon history at the time!
Who came out on top in 2017? Small businesses and entrepreneurs experienced significant growth in their sales from the previous year. Overall, Amazon Prime Day is a huge growth opportunity not to be missed for any retail company. Now is the time for you to reach a large number of shoppers by capitalizing on Prime Day—
July 16th-17th—and drive incremental revenue.
A Prime Day for Advertisers
Alongside the benefits for retailers, Amazon Prime Day also offers unlimited marketing capabilities for advertisers. Presently Amazon has various ad formats including Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), Sponsored Ads, and Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA), all of which provide advertisers with new revenue streams.
Selling on Amazon isn’t a choice; it’s a necessity to stay ahead of your competitors. Yes it seems daunting, but it’s not a matter of being intimidated or worrying about matters out of your control. With the Amazon Services flexible model, you control what you pay for with no subscription fees or contracts, and you pay only for order fulfilment and storage space used so it’s easy to keep a close eye on financials.
5 Reasons to Sell on Amazon
1. A trusted brand
The eCommerce giant is by far one of the most trusted and popular online retailers around the globe, with The Value Institute ranking them 2017’s most trustworthy brand. There’s no need to build brand awareness here—all you need to do is piggyback off their success by creating a Seller Account, and the potential for massive traffic for your product listings is huge! Alongside Amazon’s trustworthiness, if you approached anyone in the street and asked them to name five big online retailers almost certainly Amazon will be among them.
2. Customers' extremely high intent to buy
According to Statista, as of December 2017, 197 million users visited Amazon websites per month, in the US alone, which is an average of 81 per second! It could be argued that Amazon’s place within the customer journey is much further down the funnel than Google or Facebook, with searches being made with an extremely high intent to buy. This may be the reason why 60% of advertisers view Amazon and its digital advertising options as a growth opportunity or a “necessary evil,” while 17% view Amazon and its digital advertising options as a competitor.
Because of its rising popularity and trustworthiness, Amazon has also invested heavily in its advertising offerings, with Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) being one of its most commonly used formats. AMS offers a range of different ad types to fit your retail objectives, including Headline Search Ads, Sponsored Product Ads, and Product Display Ads.
While Amazon’s ad revenue of $2 billion in 2017 is still modest compared to Google ($40 billion) and Facebook ($21 billion), Marin’s State of Digital Advertising report found Amazon is capable of growing into as much an ad platform as it is a commerce platform, with 85% of respondents revealing the eCommerce giant would impact their business in 2018.
3. It’s easy
You can be up and running in no time. Selling on Amazon is a simple and effective way to reach millions of potential buyers. Whether you’re selling in small or large quantities, Amazon provides you with the tools to sell online prosperously. There are five simple steps to the process:
- Register your seller account
- Upload your listings
- Consumers see and buy your products
- Deliver your products to the customer
- Receive your payment
There are two ways to sell on Amazon, Basic (sell a little) and Pro (sell a lot) with each plan being designed to meet your needs. From as little as £25/$40 per month for a Pro plan this presents a cost effective opportunity to sell on Amazon.
4. Advertising solutions
Advertising on Amazon is an easy way to promote your listings on the platform and get your products noticed when consumers are shopping for similar items. Like Google Ads and Bing Ads, you only pay when someone clicks your ad. There are two advertising solutions: Sponsored Products for promoting individual listings, and Headline Search Ads for registered brand owners to promote their brand and product portfolio.
These solutions can help to give your products a visibility boost and maximize your sales by bringing those products to a new audience, all of which can be optimized fully when formed with an advertising technology partner who can help drive product sales and raise brand awareness on Amazon. This is done through amplifying the performance of your AMS advertising with flexible reporting and automated optimization.
5. Hands-off fulfilment and shipping
Opting for Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) lets you send your goods to Amazon’s fulfilment centers, where they’ll deliver your products to the consumer, manage customer service, and handle returns on your behalf. Amazon has the infrastructure to handle everything for you. According to Forbes, Amazon shipped over 5 billion items worldwide in 2017 alone and sellers using FBA can take advantage of Amazon's free 2-day delivery to reach approximately 100 million Amazon Prime subscribers worldwide.
A Rapidly Growing Opportunity
Although Facebook and Google still control the digital advertising industry, Amazon’s ad revenue is growing faster than both companies, with eMarketer also predicting that by 2020, Amazon will have overtaken Oath and Microsoft to claim the #3 spot in the share rankings. With its rising market share and wide variety of ad options, digital advertisers and global brands are starting to flock to Amazon.
