For ecommerce businesses around the globe, Amazon Prime Day is a major sales event and a fantastic opportunity for brands to gain exposure and help drive revenue growth through sales on Amazon.com. During this two-day event, Prime members enjoy sitewide deals while you have a chance showcase both your best-selling and brand-new products ahead of the peak holiday season.
In recent years, the positive impact of Prime Day has spread beyond Amazon.com, with ecommerce businesses seeing a significant sales uplift during the event across many of their ecommerce sales channels including brand websites, social media stores, and other ecommerce marketplaces where consumers can find can’t-miss deals.
With record-breaking digital sales, it’s no wonder that ecommerce businesses start planning months in advance to ensure that they have sufficient stock (stored in the right locations) to meet consumer demand. In anticipation of the Prime Day order volume, some businesses even tap into the expertise and infrastructure of a third-party logistics (3PL) provider to manage aspects of their logistics, like inventory management, order fulfillment, and shipping.
How can you make sure your business is ready for this year’s Prime Day? In this blog, we share some valuable Prime Day tips and trends, and discuss how a 3PL partner can help you make this year’s Prime Day a success for your business, both on and off Amazon.
Prime Day 2022 by the numbers
In 2022, Prime Day ran from July 12 through July 13. Customers purchased 300 million items worldwide - averaging over 100,000 items per minute - making it the biggest Prime Day ever. Savings for Prime members surpassed $1.7 billion, exceeding 2021, which featured 2 million deals across the site. Amazon Prime Day Live, an all-day livestream featuring top deals and celebrity appearances, also played a big role in making Prime Day in US a success, generating over 100 million views.
The weeks leading up to Prime Day were also fruitful for sellers, especially small businesses. In support of the Small Business Sweepstakes, customers purchased more than 100 million small business items in the three weeks preceding Prime Day.
Prime Day 2022 shopping trends
As Prime Day approaches, it’s helpful to examine previous trends – which can help you anticipate shopper behavior, fine tune your demand forecasts, and optimize your ecommerce strategy to make the most out of Prime Day.
In 2022, we saw some interesting trends emerge among Prime Day shoppers around the world and in the US:
Global Prime Day trends
- The top product categories that were shopped during Prime Day were Amazon Devices, Consumer Electronics, and Home.
- The bulk of the shopping worldwide happened from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. PT on July 12.
US Prime Day trends
- The best-selling categories in the US for Prime Day 2022 were Consumer Electronics, Household Essentials, and Home.
- For Prime members in the U.S., 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. PT on July 13 was the most popular time to shop.
- US customers snapped up summer items during Prime Day, purchasing more than 1.2 million pairs of sunglasses and over 1 million swimsuits.
- For small- to medium-sized businesses, Delaware, New York, and Wyoming saw the biggest sales per capita in the lead up to Prime Day.
Resources for preparing your Amazon store
To help you plan and prepare for Prime Day, we’ve assembled a few resources:
- Read our Prime Day tips – Check out this list of tips and activities – like creating exclusive discounts and prioritizing customer service – which can help your business succeed.
- Watch a Prime Day webinar – Watch this webinar from Seller University to get an overview of how to optimize your selling account for Prime Day. One important aspect of enhancing your store is A+ content, which provides customers with additional information about the products on your product page. Did you know incorporating A+ content into your marketing efforts can increase your product sales by an average of 3% to 10%? Watch this video to learn how to add A+ content to your store.
- Explore Amazon store badges – Amazon.com offers a variety of badges that can appear on your listings, including a small business badge. In a recent study, 56% of consumers said that they are prioritizing buying from small- and medium-sized businesses. Adding a badge to your listings could increase your conversions on Prime Day. Find out if you’re eligible for a badge here.
Using a 3PL to support your multi-channel sales on Prime Day
Prime Day typically generates a spike in orders for ecommerce business, and managing fulfillment across multiple channels during the event is not an easy task. Engaging a 3PL, like Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF), to handle your logistics operations can help your Prime Day run smoothly. A 3PL will enable you to:
- Optimize your inventory – Effective inventory management is one of the keys to ensuring a successful Prime Day. A 3PL can help you:
- Help prevent stockouts: The last thing you want during one of the most popular ecommerce events of the year is a stockout, causing you to miss out on potential revenue. With a 3PL, you can:
- Maintain visibility and control over inventory levels on all of your online channels – so that you can ensure that your most popular products remain in-stock.
- Consolidate your inventory into a single pool that you can use to fulfill orders across all your channels. With MCF, for example, you can utilize your inventory to fulfill both on-Amazon orders (with Fulfillment by Amazon or FBA) and off-Amazon orders (with MCF). Alaya Naturals, a supplements retailer, does just that. “MCF allows us to maintain extra inventory, which we can then use for our Amazon orders with FBA or our other sales channels’ orders with MCF. This is helpful if we encounter more Prime Day volume than we anticipated. We can’t do that with other 3PLs,” explained Avi Reiter, Co-owner of Alaya Naturals.
- Minimize excess inventory: It’s important to use your stock efficiently both during and after Prime Day. A 3PL, like MCF, can help you optimize the utilization of your inventory – so that you can improve your sell-through rate and avoid long-term storage fees. If you have excess inventory with Amazon after Prime Day is over, MCF can use that stock to fulfill orders placed on other channels. In fact, Amazon sellers who use MCF in combination with FBA have seen 24% higher inventory turns and 13% lower out-of-stock rates.
- Help prevent stockouts: The last thing you want during one of the most popular ecommerce events of the year is a stockout, causing you to miss out on potential revenue. With a 3PL, you can:
- Extend Prime Day discounts to your other channels – Partnering with a 3PL – which handles your order fulfillment – can free you up to focus on managing the deals you are offering across all your sales channels, including your brand website. And don’t forget that you can extend your website deals past Prime Day to attract the audience that may have missed out on Prime Day sales.
Maintain a first-class customer experience across channels – Shoppers expect fast shipping on Prime Day orders. Using a 3PL to manage fulfillment across all your sales channels can help you consistently delight customers, no matter what channel you sell on.
For example, MCF – which uses Amazon’s Prime-powered fulfillment network – enables you to provide customers the Amazon fulfillment experience – with shipping speeds as fast as 1-day – on your off-Amazon channels.
And if you add Buy with Prime (which is powered by MCF) to your brand website, you can attract Amazon shoppers with the trust of Prime and convert more Prime members with fast, free delivery and a checkout experience that millions of shoppers love. You can use your existing inventory in Amazon fulfillment centers to start fulfilling your Buy with Prime orders, and let Amazon handle all of your storage, delivery, and returns for products offering Buy with Prime. Learn how Amazon seller Epic Water Filters uses Buy with Prime to help attract and convert shoppers on their website.
- Simplify your operations – By outsourcing your logistics operations to a 3PL, you can streamline your inventory management and order fulfillment across all your ecommerce channels before, during, and after Prime Day.
Prospering during Prime Day with MCF
Prime Day is an exciting time of year with huge potential for increased sales, both on Amazon.com and your other online sales channels. By engaging a 3PL like MCF, you can help to make Prime Day 2023 a resounding success for your business. From optimized inventory management to extending the Amazon fulfillment experience to your other channels, MCF is here to help your ecommerce business prosper during Prime Day.
