How Sellers Can Prepare for Amazon Prime Day 2024

It’s that time of the year again when sellers should start preparing for the next big Amazon Prime Day. 

If you’ve been selling on Amazon for a while, you know how big of a deal Prime Day is! But you need to be sure you are prepared for the large influx of customer traffic. 

Continue reading to learn everything you need to know about Day 2024 and how Amazon sellers can prepare.

HINT: We’ll show you how you can use Jungle Scout Cobalt’s advanced tools to take your Prime Day preparation to the next level.

What Amazon Prime Day?

Amazon Prime Day is an annual shopping event exclusively for Amazon Prime members. It spans two days, during which Amazon and third-party sellers offer a wide array of discounts and deals across various product categories. 

Amazon Prime Day 2023 was the biggest Prime Day in Amazon’s history. Over 350 million items were purchased worldwide, resulting in a whopping $12.9 billion in sales.

READ MORE | For a full rundown on the Prime Day 2023 takeaways and insights, check out Jungle Scout’s exclusive report.

When is Amazon Prime Day?

Amazon Prime Day 2024 will take place on July 16-17.

How FBA sellers can prepare for Prime Day 2024

In order to fully reap the rewards of Prime Day, it’s important to take steps now to get your business ready for the potential uptick in sales.

1. Offer customers multiple ways to save

To entice customers to purchase your products during Prime Day, we suggest you create deals, discounts, and promotions on your listings. 

Some sellers don’t run deals at all and see a bump in sales simply due to the increased traffic. But it’s a good idea to offer customers ways to save. Here are four ways to do it:

Prime Day Event Deals

Shoppers come to Amazon during these big sales events looking for deals. While it is not completely necessary to offer a discount to see an increase in sales on this day, it can certainly help. 

Sellers had until May 3, 2024 to submit deals to have a chance to be selected for Prime Day week.

Go to the Deals section of Seller Central (Advertising > Deals) and see what you have available to submit during the Prime Day window. Keep in mind that the fees for running deals during Prime Day will be higher than normal. Amazon increases the fees because customer traffic to Amazon is significantly higher on these days, leading to greater exposure. 

For our Washable Pee Pads product, we have the option to run a Lightning Deal within the “Prime Day week window,” which will cost $300 – $500, plus the discount you provide. Typically, the Lightning Deal fee is $150, so you need to determine if the increased cost is worth it for your business.

Is the fee worth it? If you’ve had success with Lightning Deals in the past or your product has a high conversion rate, we say give this deal a go, as this deal will likely increase your product’s visibility and sales.

If your product is brand new and doesn’t have much sales history, or maybe you don’t have a big advertising budget, skip this deal and opt for a Prime Exclusive Discount or coupon. 

Prime Exclusive Discount

Lightning Deals aren’t the only discounts you can provide during Prime Day. Sellers can also offer what’s called a Prime Exclusive Discount. 

A Prime Exclusive Discount is a discount offered to Amazon Prime customers and will show a discounted price with the regular price crossed out and the percentage saved. To set up a discount in Seller Central, go to the Advertising tab > Prime Exclusive Discounts.

Typically, you’re able to set these discounts during the week of the sale, so keep an eye out for that within Seller Central. 

Coupons 

A coupon is the best way to let customers know you’re offering discounted prices because it shows up as a bright green tag next to the list price on the product detail page — customers can’t miss it, and they don’t have to go hunting for deals on a separate page.

Create a Promotion

In Seller Central, Amazon sellers can create different promotions, such as “buy one get one free” or “buy one get one 50% off.” You can also create custom social media promo codes to share with your audience or with an influencer off of Amazon. You will receive a custom marketing page to send potential customers to.

LEARN MORE | If you want to learn more about prepping your Amazon business for Prime Day, check out this webinar from Tinuiti, featuring Jungle Scout’s own Demand Generation Manager Eva Hart.

2. Order inventory 

This may sound obvious, but hopefully your inventory is already at Amazon or on its way in order to have it ready for Prime Day.

If you haven’t yet shipped inventory for Prime Day, do so as soon as possible.

If you fulfill through FBA, make sure to check your FBA capacity limits before ordering too much inventory. With the new capacity limits, sellers can now forecast their inventory needs up to three months in advance. 

If your capacity limits are currently low, work on increasing your sell-through rate and reduce excess inventory as they’re big factors when it comes to your inventory limits in Amazon. 

3. Create FBM offers if you do not have enough FBA inventory

If your inventory capacity limits are too low for what you are expecting, or maybe you won’t have enough time to ship inventory into FBA, create FBM offers on your listings so you can still offer deals and meet customer demand by fulfilling your own orders (or by using a third-party fulfillment center).

1. Sellers are able to offer both FBA and FBM fulfillment methods under one ASIN. To add an FBM option:o to “Add Products” in Seller Central.
2. Enter your ASIN.
3. Click “Sell this product
4. Enter a new SKU to identify the FBM offer “I will ship this item myself” as the fulfillment method 

If your FBA inventory runs out, your FBM offer will then go to the Buy Box, as long as you have inventory available for the FBM offer. 

4. Optimize your listings

Sellers should also focus on listing optimization in advance of any big sale event. While discounted prices are important to today’s shoppers, your product listing needs to be as attractive as possible to clinch those conversions. 

Here’s how to optimize your Amazon listings:

• Audit your listings: Check your title, bullet points, images, and descriptions to make sure they’re up-to-date, and compelling. If you need help writing your listing copy, check out Jungle Scout’s new AI Assist tool within Listing Builder!
• Split test your A+ content: If you are brand-registered, consider using Amazon’s split-testing feature to maximize your listing’s conversion potential.
• Increase your reviews: We know this is easier said than done, but using Jungle Scout’s Review Automation tool will help you increase your review count by sending automatic review requests to all of your customers. 

Doing this now instead of right before Prime Day will be beneficial as it will hopefully help you increase your sales and Best Sellers Rank before the big event. 

The more traction your listings have now, will only help you more when Amazon traffic is through the roof during the sale. 

5. Boost your marketing strategy

Make sure customers find your listings during Prime Day by boosting your brand’s visibility, on and off Amazon. Start now, so by the time the sale rolls around, you can entice your broadened audience with incredible deals.

Here are some marketing tips:

• Review your PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns. Consider bidding more aggressively for your product’s most important keywords to increase your organic ranking. If you’re a brand-registered seller, now’s the time to take advantage of your access to Amazon’s advanced PPC advertising solutions. These include Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Brands Video, Sponsored Display ads, and Sponsored TV ads.  
• Run off-Amazon ads. Drive external traffic to your deals to increase sales. Try using Facebook and Google ads’ sophisticated targeting capabilities, and remember to track your off-Amazon traffic and conversions with Amazon Attribution. 
• Use social media. Consumers are increasingly interested in finding products on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and even TikTok — capturing their interest with posts, Instagram Stories, and short videos letting them know how much they can save on your products during Prime Day. You can even recycle some of that content through Amazon Posts. 

Use Jungle Scout Cobalt to prepare for Prime Day

Jungle Scout Cobalt has Prime Day Dashboard Templates available for users to help brands better prepare for the big sales event. The templates allow you to view data from the previous year’s Prime Day so you can make strategic decisions about this year’s Prime Day. 

Prime Day templates

1. Analyze Prime Day Market Performance

2. Leverage Seller Central Data to Analyze Your Prime Day Performance

3. Leverage Vendor Central Data to Analyze Your Prime Day Performance

Shelf Intelligence

Jungle Scout Cobalt users can also utilize Shelf Intelligence to view Share of Voice, Keyword Performance, Tracked Keywords, and do keyword research in preparation for Prime Day. 

You can also create a list of top ASINs that appear on your tracked keywords and target those ASINs in a Sponsored Products manual campaign, even if it’s only during Prime Day.

• Use a time series chart to look at the month surrounding last year’s prime day (July 11-12, 2023) to understand your Share of Voice for your most important keywords and your competition’s share of voice.
  • Understand the top 5-10 brands that were placed in the Sponsored Brand headline 
  • Understand the top 5-10 brands that placed in the top 4 sponsored product placements.
  • Understand the top 5-10 brands that placed in the top 10 organic spots
• Look at position-weighted SOV and fold and area-weighted SOV
• If you have a popular brand name, don’t forget to see SOV for your branded term
• Use your tab-level date range to easily build widgets to reflect last year’s Prime Day dates.
• Use the event annotation to flag 2023 prime day dates on your time series charts

Dayparting and Advanced Budget Control

Capitalize on hourly advertising data and create Dayparting and Advanced Budget Control automations specifically for the Prime Day event.

Apply a Prime Day Dayparting Profile to campaigns to increase bids during the event. Target specific times of day to boost your bids even further. This is especially helpful when you are running lightning deals.

With Advanced Budget Control, you can increase your campaign budgets during the event and distribute your budget throughout the day to ensure that your campaigns are within budget when you need them most.

Use Keyword research to investigate search trends and previous Prime Day search volume for top-spending/high-priority keywords.

By using Dayparting and Advanced Budget Control, you can decide when you want your ads to run on Amazon and gradually increase your bids and budgets. 

Kick your ads in high gear for the 2-day event. You will need to set your Prime Day multiplier on the Monday before the event and make sure to go in and drop it back down after the event (you don’t want your high multiplier to go into effect the following Tuesday and Wednesday.)

Prime Day Dayparting example:

Prime Day Advanced Budget Control example:

Amazon Prime Day history

In 2015, Amazon introduced Prime Day — a day of deals and sales across Amazon.com — as a way to celebrate their Prime members on Amazon’s 20th birthday.

The first iteration of Prime Day happened on July 15 and ran for 24 hours. Now, Prime Day runs for two full days. Initially, Prime Day deals were only available in nine countries, but the list expanded each year, with the number of participating countries reaching 18 in 2019. 

The sales event has been a massive success ever since — even the events of 2020 couldn’t stop it. 

Prime Day success over the years

2015 

Amazon raked in even more earnings during Prime Day 2015 than it did during its record-breaking 2014 Black Friday sales event. Additionally, in its first year, FBA sellers worldwide saw a 300% increase in sales, with 34.4 million goods sold.  

2016 

The following year, in 2016, Prime Day grew. Belgium participated (bringing the total number of participating countries to 10), sales worldwide were 60% higher than in 2015, and 3P sellers offering deals nearly tripled their orders year-over-year.

2017

Prime Day 2017 saw even greater growth, not only in terms of products sold (50% more than in 2016) and participating countries (up from 10 to 12) but in the length of time the deal day lasted as well — from 24 hours to 30.

2018

Then, in 2018 and due to the success of the extended hours, Amazon took it a step further and ran Prime Day for 36 hours. Once again, it paid off.

Prime members worldwide bought over 100 million products, SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) earned over $1.5 billion in revenue, and it was Amazon’s largest day-and-a-half of sales globally.

2019

Finally, Prime Day 2019 ran for 48 hours, and sales eclipsed 2018’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales combined. 

During that two-day time frame, shoppers bought more than 175 million items, generating over $2 billion in revenue for third-party sellers. In fact, some sellers reported experiencing an increase in sales anywhere from 23% to 200%. 

2020

Amid concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused manufacturing slowdowns and the prioritization of essential goods, Amazon delayed Prime Day 2020 until October 13-14 in the U.S. Despite Americans’ widely reduced consumer spending during that time, Prime Day still charted record-breaking sales, with Prime members saving over $1.4 billion over the course of the event. 

2021

In 2021, Prime Day occurred on June 21-22, earlier than any other year. Despite some consumers being more cautious about their spending, it didn’t stop everyone from finding a good deal during this year’s event. 

Prime Day 2021 marked another record year for Amazon with total event sales reaching $11.2 billion, compared to $10.4 billion in 2020. Amazon also highlighted Prime Day 2021 as the biggest two-day period ever for third-party sellers.

2022

In 2022, Prime Day occurred on July 12-13, which was the typical timing for this event. In 2020 and 2021, Amazon Prime Day occurred in October and June, respectively, due to the pandemic. 

Prime Day 2022 was Amazon’s biggest year yet. Sales were up 15% from Prime Day 2021 and revenue was up 29% – while saving customers a total of $1.7 billion.

2023

The first day of Prime Day 2023 was the single largest sales day ever on Amazon, making that years Prime Day the biggest yet. 

Amazon Prime members purchased more than 375 million items worldwide and saved more than $2.5 billion on millions of deals. This big success was large in part of third-party sellers like yourself.