Five Ways Amazon Sellers Can Maximize Holiday Sales In 2023

Holiday sales may look different in 2022 compared to last year due to global factors such as inflation and supply chain disruption impacting eCommerce. This reality highlights the importance of adopting an effective selling strategy to maximize your Amazon sales this holiday season. As such, this article identifies five simple yet impactful things Amazon sellers can do to boost sales and offers additional tips and tricks on how to optimize product listings to attract holiday shoppers. 

It’s important to go the extra mile in the last two months of the year since that is when the most significant shopping events happen on Amazon, such as the Cyber Five and Christmas. Cyber Five, which is the kickoff of the holiday season, refers to the days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. According to a recent Adobe study, this window occurring toward the end of November is predicted to reach a total estimate of $209.7 billion this year in season revenue. 

The good news is that the five ways to maximize sales explained below don’t require months-long preparation and can be implemented soon before the start of the holiday shopping season. What’s more, incorporating the following has additional long-term benefits, such as increasing your odds of winning the Amazon Buy Box, reducing product return rates, improving customer loyalty, and boosting your product’s organic rank.

1. Invest in Amazon Sponsored Brands Video Ad Campaigns

According to a DataHawk study that examined Amazon Sponsored Ads efficacy from 2021, it was found that among the four sponsored campaign types, Sponsored Brands Video ads generated the highest RoAS in the weeks leading to Christmas. While advertisers spent a large majority of their advertising budgets on Sponsored Product ads, Sponsored Brands Video ads were the campaigns that yielded the highest return, followed by Sponsored Brands ads.

Based on these findings, it can be deduced that a similar trend will follow suit this holiday season. As a result, it may be worth leveraging the efficacy of Sponsored Brands Video ads at the beginning of December to drive more sales this holiday season. However, advertisers are advised to scale back on ad spending during the last week of December, shortly after the peak, as the data saw a 20.8 percent drop in RoAS for Sponsored Brands Video ads.

2. Incorporate Holiday Keywords Into Your Amazon Listings

The goal is to conduct Amazon keyword research and find a variety of themed keywords to rank above your competitors and leverage those search terms shoppers are searching for this holiday season. Start by building a holiday keyword list. It’s always worth checking competitors’ listings to see if they have added any holiday keywords to their product listings. If so, add them to your list. If the competing product is a Best Seller, it’s important to note how many times they used the holiday keyword in their listing so that you can do the same. You can also enter holiday keyword ideas on Google and scroll down to the “related searches” section to get similar results and alternative ideas. 

For example, if you sell coffee on Amazon, you may want to incorporate some of the following seasonal keywords into your listing: holiday flavor, seasonal blend, Christmas blend, gift, etc. Product descriptions could also be altered to highlight the holidays. For instance, in the “about this item” section of the listing, one could say, “Dark roast–the perfect holiday blend for the most festive time of year made to spice up your holiday cheer” or “A Christmastime favorite, the aroma of the seasonal dark roast not only makes it feel like Christmas but also smells and tastes like it too.”

Once you’ve established a long enough list, the next step is to research those keywords in terms of efficacy to determine whether or not they are worth adding to your repertoire. You could use tools like DataHawk’s Amazon Analytics product to decide which keywords to incorporate by analyzing metrics such as organic ranking data, keyword search volume estimation, and keyword volatility, among many other things. Lastly, optimize your product content according to your research by implementing the most impactful holiday search keywords to boost your product’s holiday discovery. 

3. Price Products Competitively 

A product’s price plays a crucial role in shoppers’ purchase-making process and can be a determining factor on Amazon when making a sale, especially during the holidays. Reducing your product’s price just for the season can go a long way in terms of boosting profits. A well-known but underutilized strategy is keeping your prices a smidge lower than your competitors, enough to increase your sales volume but not low enough to diminish it. Though regularly monitoring your competitors’ dynamic Amazon pricing strategies can be tedious, it doesn’t have to be. 

The most effective way to monitor competitors’ pricing shifts without wasting time is to set up Amazon product price change alerts. They allow you to receive alerts on changes in any product’s price. In setting up such alerts, you can respond timely to competitors’ price changes and alter your product’s price accordingly to push your potential customers away from your rivals and toward your products. Perhaps the most important products to monitor are Amazon products, especially after the eCommerce giant was accused and tried for violating antitrust laws by blocking price competition. Holiday strategies are all about being proactive. Therefore, closely observing competitors’ price changes and responding to them in real time can make or break a sale. 

4. Update Product Listing Images

Images play a crucial role in consumers’ decisions to purchase a product. For example, a study conducted by Insider Intelligence reported that 83 percent of US smartphone users claim product images to be a “very” and “extremely” influential factor when buying a product online. Therefore, when optimizing product detail pages for the holidays, be sure to update your images. You can even go one step further by incorporating engaging and high-quality holiday-themed multimedia content, such as videos, to make your product stand out. 

Many are familiar with the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and that’s because they are. The concept of an image or photo can convey multiple ideas and induce different sentiments in different people allowing them to be more effective than a mere written description. As such, placing your product next to a Christmas tree, stocking, or any other holiday signifier has the ability to subconsciously influence shoppers to associate the product with a holiday gift. In turn, such a strategy can increase shoppers’ odds of purchasing your product as a gift for someone over choosing to buy a competitor’s product. 

5. Address Negative Product Reviews

One of the many reasons Amazon is such a popular online shopping destination is its wealth of user-generated content, such as ratings and reviews. For example, a research review from PowerReviews that surveyed over one thousand US consumers found that 55 percent of respondents said they continue to start their purchase journeys on Amazon because of its large volume of customer reviews. Typically, shoppers rely on Amazon reviews to make well-informed purchasing decisions. Among the respondents from the PowerReviews survey, 61 percent said they consult Amazon reviews before buying a product, while 33 percent sometimes read reviews before buying.

Another study from Oberlo revealed that product pages with customer reviews bring 3.5 times more conversions than those without. These findings highlight the importance of addressing or rectifying bad reviews on your Amazon listing to ensure shoppers aren’t persuaded to shop for a rival product with better reviews. At a time when every dollar counts, more and more shoppers will reference product reviews before making a purchase.

Conclusion

The holidays are an excellent way for Amazon sellers to simultaneously maximize their sales and liquidate inventory. However, in order to effectively do so, they should adopt the five strategies outlined in the article. The positive outcome of such practices is plentiful.

To summarize: investing in sponsored ad campaigns can attract new customers to your product; incorporating holiday keywords into listings can boost product discovery by increasing organic or sponsored search ranking; pricing products competitively can increase a product’s odds of winning the Amazon Buy Box; updating product listing images can positively influence shoppers purchasing behavior; addressing negative product reviews increase conversions. Lastly, it’s always beneficial to analyze sales, SEO, and ads data from previous holiday optimization efforts to assess their efficacy, reemploy what worked well, and omit what didn’t.