Amazon has announced the Great Indian Festival (GIF) Sale.
Last year, The GIF sale was a huge success. With more than 40 lakh new customers purchased and over 600 crores saved thanks to stellar GIF sales deals and discounts. GIF sale 2024 has the potential to be even larger with eager shoppers looking to save big. This year is a crucial time to get in front of new customers in the competitive eCommerce market.
The big question is: Are you ready?
From an end-to-end account management approach, the following post will outline what you should do before a GIF sale to maximize sales and make this your most successful Diwali sale yet.
This is a small checklist that contains the basics that you have to do –
Confirm your deals are live.
Troubleshoot any ASIN suppression..
Check the buy box status to ensure you are winning the featured offer.
Research across categories and competitors for in depth market understanding.
Track inventory for out-of-stock (OOS) occurrence. If out of stock happens (FBA or Amazon owned), ensure that the Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM) / Seller Flex (SF) inventory is loaded. Track to ensure the Buy Box is not lost with these backup inventories.
Check creatives to ensure all Amazon ads are delivering.
Adjust budget pacing based on initial performance.
Monitor placements on high-converting keywords.
Check and adjust CPC bids and CPMs to ensure scale and delivery.
1. Check Your Inventory Levels
We say it every year and we will repeat it: Don’t go out of stock!!
Running out of stock leads to lost chances to generate revenue. If an item is not available, potential buyers might go to rival brands and your Best seller rank(BSR) will decrease significantly, causing a decrease in sales and income. Furthermore, running out of stock frequently puts you at risk of losing the buy box to competitors with available products. This can greatly decrease the visibility and organic sales of your products.
Consistently selling and keeping inventory levels high can boost your Amazon SEO ranking. The higher your sales volume, the higher your product will be ranked in search results, resulting in improved visibility and potential sales. For instance, a profitable GIF Sale transaction could elevate your position on the Amazon BSRs for the entire year. However, if you run out of stock, you will miss out on the opportunity to increase your rankings.
“If you understand Amazon’s Algorithm well, you would know that going Out of Stock is the biggest sin that you can commit as a seller.
Start way ahead with your inventory plans, send them to FBA so that you’re available regionally and ship your products to the customers as fast as possible. This will lead to an organic uptick obvious conversions improvement.”
– Himanshu Gaba, Co-founder, Adsify
2. Analyze Your Historical Performance
It is crucial to consider more than just sales data when assessing the effectiveness of promotions, especially during events like GIF sale. Take into account elements like the varieties of deals, promotional activities, and advertising expenses linked to selling every item. Measuring the effectiveness of promotional activities is crucial with the use of Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) as a key metric.
3. Start Optimizing Your Listings Early
Improving your product detail pages should be a main focus for your brand before this GIF Sale. By optimizing your listings, you can connect with consumers more efficiently by ensuring your products appear in search results at the right time and place.
Check out a few of our quick tips for optimizing your listings:
Increase budgets for must-win keyword campaigns – Identify top-performing keywords and allocate higher budgets accordingly.
Increase bids on high impression, short-tail keywords – Identify keywords with high impressions but low conversions, then gradually increase bids while monitoring performance.
Audit and update listings – Review your listings for accuracy and completeness using tools in Amazon Seller Central and Vendor Central. For example, have you listed high-opportunity keywords in our title? Are your product bullets well-written and descriptive of the product features?
Fix inactive or suppressed listings – Ensure you are following Amazon’s guidelines and that you are including all the information Amazon requires when it comes to your listings.
Add a featured video – Did you know that 96% of consumers report that video helps them make purchase decisions? For a high-stakes event like GIF Sale, adding a compelling product video to your listing can make all the difference.
Start A/B testing early – A/B testing involves changing a single variable in your product listing, such as title text or images, and measuring its impact on metrics like impressions and conversions. Identify elements for A/B testing now so you have plenty of time to gradually optimize for conversions before GIF sale
Optimize titles and descriptions for SEO – To aid shoppers and improve search visibility, draft concise, keyword-rich titles, descriptions, and bullet points. However, keep in mind that real shoppers will read your search optimized content, so make sure it’s easy to read and not completely stuffed with keywords.
Enhance with visuals and A+ content – Brands can put up to six images and one product video on their listings, and brands that take advantage of that real estate are likely to boost their conversion rates and search visibility. As a next step, utilize Amazon A+ Content to provide additional details and comparison charts, enhancing brand perception and differentiating from competitors.
“Your product detail page is your real estate, make sure you own it. Your inputs shouldn’t be limited to just images and title, make sure you explain your benefits, features and use cases in A+, bullet points, images descriptions as well so that customers can make informed decisions about your product. In your listing, give them a reason to purchase from your and not from your next competitor”
– Himanshu Gaba, Co-founder, Adsify
How To Manage Account Health on Amazon
Maintaining a good health of your Amazon account is definitely among the most critical factors to succeed on Amazon. The visualization Amazon offers through Account Health was intended to improve the level of performance and motivate sellers to seek out customer problems. This score is determined from factors such as your order defect rate, late shipment rate, valid tracking rate among others. The higher your score, the greater the possibility of the listings to acquire higher visibility and faster sales velocity. However, if such problems persist you could be barred or even have your account frozen or closed down. That is why it is important to keep a close eye on your Account Health page and ensure all the numbers are green
Here, you will find all the necessary information concerning how to avoid the problems connected with Amazon account health. In this guide you will find out what metrics affect your score, how you can improve them, and how to run a healthy and compliant seller account. Let’s get started!
Amazon evaluates each seller account with an overall Account Health Rating, reflecting performance across three main areas:
1. Customer Service Performance: This measures things such as your order defect rate, cancellation rate, late shipment rate, and refund rate.
2. Policy Compliance: Regarding policy offence linked to the listings, intellectual property, authenticity of products among others, Amazon takes necessary actions.
3. Shipping Performance: Here the following data counted; Tracking information, Valid Tracking rate, Estimated delivery date errors and Successful delivery rate.
Your rating can be Excellent, Good, Fair and At Risk or Poor. A poor score results in restrictions and bans while a fair score means limitations. Account health therefore needs to be optimized across all its features for ease of selling in addition to growth prospects.
4. Set Aside Additional Budget for PPC Bids
Keep in mind that GIF Sale is highly competitive which means ad space will cost more money on the platform. If you place your bids too low, you will lose to other bidders and your ads are less likely to be seen by consumers. Failure to set a spending limit could lead to quickly depleting your budget.
These are my best practices and top tips for successful bidding in GIF Sale.
Determine the best keywords and targets that have met business KPI goals in the past 30 days. Increase bids against these by 10-15% during GIF sale and/or brand’s promo/deal moments.
Begin by boosting the number of branded keywords/targets by 10-15% and then observe the results.
It is advised not to raise bids when a brand lacks deals – instead, capitalize on the surge of traffic on Amazon.
Keep track of your bids and budget during GIF Sale and adjust as needed.
Maintain a record of every modification so you can revert back post GIF sale
Amazon experiences an increase in advertising demand and competition, leading to higher ad costs, during the GIF Sale. Brands require increased bids in order to remain noticeable. Nonetheless, platforms such as Facebook or Instagram do not experience comparable increases in costs. Let’s delve further into how brands can increase awareness of GIF sales on social media and using influencer marketing.