Follow the Data Episode 3: Q4 Part II Inventory Planning & Promotions
With more people shopping on phones and tablets, your listing needs to be optimized for mobile. Then, once you’ve made your listing shopper friend, carefully planning your inventory and perfectly timing a product promotion are crucial if you want to ride the wave of holiday sales. Join Cameron and Casey as they dive into planning for Q4.
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Follow the Data Show Notes:
- Learn more about Enhanced Brand Content and Amazon’s Brand Registry Program here.
- Amazon Enhanced Brand Content and A+ Pages Now Visible for Many Products On Mobile
- If Prime Day 2017 is any indication of what this holiday season will bring, you’ll want to check out our summary of the biggest single day of sales in Amazon’s history.
- Learn more about how to estimate your inventory needs using the Market Intelligence Market Trends with our free Q4 Guide. Available for download here.
- Check out our
- How to Launch YouTube Course
- A Viral Launch Review: 3 Amazon Product Launch Case Studies
- Want to be on the show? Reach out to our content team!
Podcast Transcript
Casey Gauss:
You need to have your ducks in a row for Q4 because this is the biggest shopping season of your career.
Cameron Yoder:
And we’re back with part two of our Q4 episode to talk about the role of enhanced brand content in optimizing your listing, how to make sure your products look great on mobile, how to predict your inventory needs and how to time a product launch to ride the holiday sales wave. Let’s get started.
Now let’s talk about enhanced brand content, EBC.
Casey Gauss:
Yeah, at the end of the day, you guys, anything that you can do to improve conversion rate, to improve – drive sales at the end of the day, you should be doing, right? And so enhanced brand content, these are things you should already be doing, but you know, our hope is that you’re really concerned about these Q4 sales and that you’re going to, I don’t know, get your house in order, whatever the saying is, in order to maximize sales for Q4. And the best way to do that is to have enhanced brand content because some of your competitors are not going to. And that’s a leg up. Or they are going to, and that’s a leg up they will have over you. So please have enhanced brand content.
Cameron Yoder:
If you aren’t brand registered yet, it’s too late right now for this holiday season, for Q4, but – unless you’re already in the process of going through the trademarks and everything. But this might be a good step for you to take if you don’t, if you aren’t brand registered and if you don’t have enhanced brand content. So basically you might be better off focusing on other things if you aren’t already brand registered this holiday season.
Casey Gauss:
True.
Cameron Yoder:
And this might be a good thing to focus on for the next year or to start the next year. Overall, basically what I like to think of is if you have your listing photos and everything else as optimized as possible this is kind of the next viable step or option to dive into.
Casey Gauss:
And honestly it doesn’t take that long to file for a trademark.
Cameron Yoder:
No.
Casey Gauss:
And just some other side benefits of brand registry, why you’d want to be in there, this is outside of Q4 unless you are in brand registry, is just the Early Reviewer Program, getting those initial five reviews, really I don’t think people value reviews enough, and this is a good way to grab some of those reviews.
Cameron Yoder:
Reviews, the reviews are like the currency of Amazon.
Casey Gauss:
Yeah, that’s how I feel. Anyways, you get your own Amazon stores. We’re still looking for the data on how important those are. Headline search ads, those are very, very powerful, at least right now, so get brand registry so you can have access to all these things. Also, enhanced brand content, we put out a blog post recently about this, but it’s also on mobile. And I think Amazon said last year 70% of shoppers used, made a purchase or ran a search on the mobile app. And so that means that more and more people are going to be seeing your enhanced brand content, and so put that out there.
Cameron Yoder:
Mobile is, in general, just another really good thing to focus on in Q4. I mean another stat – Casey, you touched on one stat – but the mobile app actually grew by about 56% last holiday season.
Casey Gauss:
Oh nice.
Cameron Yoder:
And so it’s going to grow again, I mean not 100%, I don’t know that 100%, but I’m predicting that it’s going to grow this holiday season. One other thing that I would also consider if you are, again, going through all this and enhancing your listing and photos and everything, is to go – if you don’t, or if you haven’t yet, go look up your product or products on a mobile device just to see how they look and how they feel because then if you haven’t yet you can take a look at that and see okay, if there’s this large of a percentage of people ordering on mobile I need to make sure that my stuff is optimized on mobile. And if you haven’t seen it yourself yet, then you probably should.
Casey Gauss:
Yeah, at the end of the day you need to understand how your customers are perceiving your product.
Cameron Yoder: Exactly.
Casey Gauss:
We have just a few additional things, honestly what I think is the most important or the biggest actionable takeaway coming up.
Rebecca Longenecker:
Did you ever wish you could go back in time and get into the Amazon market earlier? What if you had been one of the original sellers? Well, here’s your opportunity. Amazon is starting to ramp up in other countries. If you’re looking to get in early and launch your products in Canada, the UK, Germany, Italy, France, Spain or all of the above, we’ve got exciting news. Viral Launch is now offering international launches. Set up a promotion for Amazon Canada, UK Germany, Italy, France or Spain with the launch experts you know and trust. Stay tuned for additional countries like Japan and Mexico.
Casey Gauss:
First off, just know your turnaround times. You have very limited time to place a purchase order for – if your stuff needs to be in for Christmas. So definitely make sure that you are well aware of your turnaround time, which has got to be coming right up to the end of it. Make sure that you are aware of the trends with market intelligence, basically what we’re doing for a particular market. Let’s take candy canes as an example. This is a classic example for us. If you go search candy canes and then you run market intelligence and move over to the market trends tab, we will show you exactly when sales start to increase across the market for this particular product. So if you run market intelligence through candy canes you can see in 2015 and in 2016 when the sales started to increase, and it’s pretty awesome because you can see here’s when sales started to increase, here’s to what degree they increased, you know, what were the orders per day, how long did that increase sustain?
Cameron Yoder:
What were prices like?
Casey Gauss: What were prices like, how did prices change throughout that? And this is different than looking at Keepa or CamelCamelCamel that has all this historical data because we are showing you across the market, whereas let’s say one particular candy cane seller, if you’re just looking at their BSR history maybe they ran a promotion. Maybe they were running outside sales, and that’s why the spike happened in October instead of November when everybody else’s increased. It’s not very indicative of the market if you’re just looking at one ASIN. You need to look at the market as a whole. But this is a really, really cool feature of market intelligence when it comes to seasonal products. The same is true for Halloween. This will probably be out before Halloween. So if you run through market intelligence through candy canes, you can see in 2015 and in 2016 when the sales started to increase, and it’s pretty awesome because you can see here’s when sales started to increase, here’s to what degree they increased, you know, what were the orders per day, how long did that increase sustain?
Cameron Yoder:
What were prices like?
Casey Gauss:
What were prices like, how did prices change throughout that? And again, across the market versus seeing one guy who raised his price like an insane amount and his sales didn’t reflect that increase or didn’t help support, didn’t show that people were actually buying it at that price point. So anyways, what you need to do, go look. If sales increased on October 15th you need to have your inventory checked into FBA at least 10 days before that so that you can prepare.
Cameron Yoder:
I mean this is one of the biggest questions that sellers have around this time of the year is okay, what can I expect in terms of inventory? How much inventory am I going to need in preparation for Q4? And this is one of the best answers in predictive software that is going to let you know how much or around how much you need to order and have in place and also when you need to have it in place. Once you’ve got your holiday inventory figured out you need to start strategically positioning yourself to ride the wave of holiday sales.
Casey Gauss:
We saw people have insane amount of success when it came to Prime Day. Riding the wave is really, essentially as sales increase you need to make sure that you’re on top of that wave of new traffic or sales increase so that you can ride it. And here’s the example, right, so let’s say right now barely anybody is buying candy canes. So let’s just say those guys are doing five sales a day on average. People in top 10, selling five units a day on average. But during peak time these guys are selling 300 units a day, let’s just say. So to get ranking in the top 10 for candy canes, right now all I need to do is give away five units a day, and I’ll be in the top 10, and that’s really cheap. But if you time everything just right and you run a promotion so you are ranking in the top 10 right when that sales wave happens, right, then you will get to take part in that wave of sales increase. So when sales moved to 15 a day, well, I’m at the top of page 1, so I’m getting a bunch more sales. And then, you know, by December or whenever the peak is, I’m seeing an insane amount of sales because I was ranking at the start of it, and I just continued to maintain that rank because people continued to buy my products.
And so what we see other people try to do is let’s say with the candy canes again, by November 15th everyone is selling 50 units a day or 100 units a day. Let’s say 50. So in order for me to get ranking the top of page 1, well, now you have to run a promotion giving away 50 units a day in order to try to hit page 1. But the problem is these guys also have a great sales history, which we recently talked about. Basically the analogy is riding the wave, right? So if you run a promotion before things start, you get on top of that wave and you ride it up as sea level increases, or whatever. But if you don’t run that promotion now you are under this wave of 50 sales a day that you now have to paddle all the way up to, now catch your breath, now try to ride that wave up.
So what we saw with Prime Day is people that were – they ran promotions across their entire account, and they saw 400, this one particular person, saw $400,000 in that 24 hour period because with their 10 products or so they ran a promotion so that they were raking at the top of page 1 for each product right before those Prime Day sales kicked in. And so as Prime Day sales kicked in, they rode that wave, and they absolutely killed it. And so we really, really hope that you guys do that. Whatever your method of ranking is, whether it be Viral Launch, whether it be some other competitor, whatever your method is, make sure that you are ranking at the top of page 1 right when that wave of sales increase begins to happen because you definitely don’t want to be paddling from underneath, and you definitely don’t want to be fighting these competitors’ better sales history.
Cameron Yoder:
It’s just going to be, in the long run, kind of summarizing what Casey said, it is just going to be much easier to jump on when sales are lower but at the very beginning of when they start to pick up so that you’re visible, you’re on page 1, so again, you can ride that wave like a California surfer.
Casey Gauss:
And the research that you did to understand when those trends start to pick up is going to inform you of, okay, let’s say it’s October 15th that sales start to increase. Well, walk back seven days. Walk back five days. That’s the day your promotion needs to start so that at the end of that promotion you’re ranking page 1, and as sales start to increase you ride along with it.
Cameron Yoder:
Another good action step for this podcast is to encourage you guys to really just lay out the dates that you need to follow things through by because there are a lot of dates involved with Q4. Again, we went through the deadlines, but even more than that it’s days to make sure that you’ve run your promotions by, that you’re on page 1 by, that you’re ranking by, while taking into account the fact that you have to or should be following all these deadlines for like Black Friday or Christmas. So I would say just go lay out, whether it’s a physical calendar or a digital one, and make a strategy for Q4.
Casey Gauss:
And you have to do this for each product, right?
Cameron Yoder:
Yes.
Casey Gauss:
Because each product is going to have a different pickup date in terms of sales.
Cameron Yoder:
Right, right, right, right. There was a product whose big point of Q4 was actually after the Christmas season. So that person is going to have to plan their launches and their inventory a little differently than someone whose peak is right at that November-December point. So again, like Casey said, just go through each ASIN, each product, and create a plan individually.
Casey Gauss:
Yep, and you know, same is true, ride the wave for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. The last thing we want you to do is to come to us for, you know, these candy canes on October 15th and say hey, more people are starting to buy these candy canes. Can I run a promotion to help get ranking? Or, you know, the last thing I want to see is that happen in December because –
Cameron Yoder:
Oh, geez.
Casey Gauss:
– to ride that wave like you’re going to have to be spending thousands and thousands, if not five figures, to catch up.
Cameron Yoder:
That’s a lot of candy canes there.
Casey Gauss:
Yeah.
Cameron Yoder:
Well, that’s all for this episode. Thanks for joining us on Follow the Data, and good luck as you prep for Q4. For more reliable information about how to succeed during all four seasons, subscribe to the podcast and check out the Viral Launch blog at Viral-Launch.com.
Casey Gauss:
And don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you like the podcast. We really appreciate your feedback. We like to know how to be better, so we would love your honest feedback. And if you like what we’re doing, leaving a review helps other people find us as well.
Cameron Yoder:
Exactly. And if you’re wondering about how exactly Viral Launch helps Amazon sellers, make sure to check out one of our more recent blog posts, a Viral Launch review by marketplace director Lindsay Todd. She’s great. She shares three awesome stories about a few of our clients that utilize Viral Launch software to take their businesses to the next level. We’ve also got a new course up on our YouTube channel about how to set up a product launch. You can have a coach walk you through the whole process at your convenience and with the option to play back all of the information.
Casey Gauss:
Want to be featured on the show? Leave a voicemail and tell us your thoughts on today’s episode, or ask us any of your Amazon questions. Our number is 317-721-6590. Join us for Episode 3 where we dispel the diversification myth. Until then, remember, the data is out there.
About the Amazon FBA Seller Podcast:
Viral Launch CEO, Casey Gauss, and Amazon Seller Coach Cameron Yoder bring data-driven insights to the Seller community in their weekly discussions.
On the show you’ll get the latest Amazon selling strategies and best practices based on the company’s experience launching over 22,000 products and working with over 5,500 brands. Casey and Cam will bring you up to speed on the latest Amazon news, share stories of success and failure, explore the difficulties of entrepreneurship, and discuss the way Amazon is changing retail.
At the center of the show is the Viral Launch commitment to offering reliable information to today’s entrepreneurs.
