Vendor Summit | Mastering Peak-Period Readiness

Session Transcript

Paul Sonneveld
Well, last but not least, we have Sam Adams coming up, and he's going to talk about mastering peak period readiness. Let me bring him on stage. He's right here. 

Sam Adams
Hey, Paul. 

Paul Sonneveld
Hey, Sam. How are you? 

Sam Adams
Good. Thank you. I'm doing well. How are you? 

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, good, good. For those of you, those of the audience that haven't met Sam, let me quickly introduce him. So Sam is the client partner at Toucan e-commerce. He really specialises in making brands peak ready, ensuring operations, inventory planning, promotions, advertising all work together so that customers know those moments that really matter really perform well. So, this is all about creating a bit of a blueprint for peak execution. It's great to have you here, Sam. I've got your presentation here let me load that up. 

Sam Adams
Perfect thank you. 

Paul Sonneveld
I'll hand the stage over to you. 

Sam Adams
Great, thank you for the introduction. Yeah, as Paul said i'm going to be taking you through the importance of tentpole events and deal preparations as a vendor. So to begin with, why do deal events matter on Amazon? Amazon is leading the charge with revenue deal events. In 2023, Amazon's sales accounted for over seventeen percent of all Black Friday sales globally. So customers want to click, not think. Eighty nine percent of millennial males purchase the first product they see when browsing. So we need to make sure we meet the customer where they are. And with just under twenty percent of global sales, Amazon is a great place to start. 

In line with this, Prime Day revenue continues to grow annually with an average growth rate of forty two percent. This indicates a consumer behaviour trend with more people participating in online shopping, taking advantage of Prime Day deals and possibly expanding their use of Amazon Prime subscriptions. This also outlines Amazon's dominance. The steady increase implies that Amazon continue to strengthen its position as a dominant e-commerce player, using Prime Day as a key driver to build brands loyalty, boost sales and increase Prime memberships. 

Discovery is also a strong characteristic of Prime Day, with one-third of shoppers discovering a new product or brand over Prime Day, 2024. This statistic highlights Amazon Prime Day's role not just as a shopping event, but as a discovery tool for consumers and for brands to reach new audiences. This makes Prime Day a great opportunity for smaller or emerging brands to gain visibility and attract new customers, or even established brands can benefit from increased exposure to shoppers who might not have previously considered their product. 

So it's no wonder, given the statistics we've just discussed, that these tentpole events have become retail phenomena influencing not only Amazon sales, but also the broader e-commerce landscape. Here's why. Massive discounts and promotions. Amazon's tentpole events are synonymous with deep discounts on popular products. Shoppers expect substantial savings during these periods, leading to a surge in demand. These discounts can span across various categories from electronics and fashions to home good and groceries, encouraging consumers to make purchases they might have postponed. 

Prime membership incentives. Events like Prime Day are exclusive to Amazon Prime members, creating a sense of urgency for non-members to sign up so they don't get FOMO over these deal events. The combination of exclusive access and substantial discounts attract millions of new Prime subscribers, many of whom continue shopping regularly on Amazon throughout the year. This increases customer lifetime value and contributes to the ongoing retail peaks. Their influence on competitors and broader retail ecosystems. Amazon's events push competitors, both online and physical retailers, to offer their own sales in response, creating a retail-wide surge. For example, during Prime Day, companies like Walmart, Target and Best Buy often launch parallel promotions, which amplify the overall retail peak as consumers compare deals across platforms. their expansion beyond core markets. 

Amazon's tentpole events have a global impact. Prime Day in particular spans multiple countries and regions, bringing a global influx of sales, not just in North America. This expanded geographical reach creates additional peaks in various markets simultaneously, amplifying the overall effect. The behavioural habit formation. Amazon's consistent cadence of ten-pole events creates shopping habits. Consumers now expect significant deals during these events and plan their purchase around them. For instance, many delay buying electronics or holiday gifts until Black Friday or Cyber Monday, contributing to consistent retail peaks around these times year after year. 

In summary, Amazon tentpole events create a powerful mix of consumer demand, aggressive marketing, competitive pricing, and exclusive offers that not only boost Amazon's own sales, but create ripples across the entire retail ecosystem. These elements converge to create retail peaks, not only for Amazon, but for the broader market throughout the year. So the next question is, what type of deals can we offer the consumers to encourage their conversions? Amazon offers several types of deals to help shoppers save money, and each category has unique characteristics. 

I'll now take you through a breakdown of the Amazon Lightning Deals, Amazon Best Deals, and Amazon Top Deals, along with their differences and benefits. For Amazon Lightning Deals, these deals provide limited time offers that are available for up to twelve hours or until stock runs out. When submitting, the deal price must be fifteen percent lower than the last thirty day price, so deals always need to be planned in advance into your promotional calendar. You as the vendor will submit a certain quantity of stock for the deal, which will then be discounted. And once the quantity is sold out or the time runs out, the deal will end. Customers can see the remaining stock and time left in real time, encouraging urgency and demand. These fast-paced deals help create demand and urgency from consumers due to their limited availability, encouraging conversions. 

Amazon best deals are longer-lasting promotions lasting up to two weeks, offering a minimum of fifteen percent savings on a wide range of products. Similar to lightning deals, the price has to be fifteen percent off the last thirty day price, so you need to plan ahead and be prepared. On Vendor Central, you can submit ASINs from your catalogue to be on deal. However, there are some criteria. Products have to be eligible for Prime. This means they need a three and a half star minimum, need stock, and need to be willing to buy box. 

They'll also need a sales history over the last thirty days so Amazon can calculate the was price. Benefits of these include wide availability. So unlike Lightning Deals, best deals are available for a longer period and tend to have more stock. Steady discounts. These deals often offer more consistent discounts without the urgency associated with Lightning Deals. And there's no rush. Since these deals last longer, shoppers don't have to rush to purchase and can think more carefully about their decision. 

And finally, Amazon top deals these deals can be agreed with your avs or vm if you have access to one and run for several days or weeks with a minimum discount of fifteen percent similar to best deals. However there are some key differences these deals appear on the Amazon deals page making them much more prominent. Better deal placement can also be agreed with your avs or vm to move your products further towards the top of the deal page. With these, your AVS or VM will approach you prior to the deal event, usually a few weeks beforehand, to curate what ASINs you want to put on deal. 

Benefits of these are similar to best deals in terms of steady and consistent discount without the urgency. However, the key benefit of top deals is their placement. These deals appear on the Amazon deal page, giving your product and brand much more visibility to consumers browsing all available top deals. And as I said, better placement of these deals can be agreed with your AVS or VM, making your deals more prominent to the consumer. A general theme running through all these deals is that funding will be required from your side as a vendor in terms of a sellout agreement, or more commonly known as SOAs. These will decide the level of discount that goes on your product for the deal event. 

Overall, all these deal types are important to take advantage of as a vendor over deal events and can be crucial to your success as these can help you stand out in your category and against your competitors. Outside of these deals, price discounts are available to you, which are self-funded but can be set up to run for up to twelve months. These have no minimum discount, helping you still provide a discount to consumers over key periods, even if margins don't allow you to apply larger discounts. You can also apply vouchers, which consumers have to click to apply and are again self-funded. These vouchers have to be between five and eighty-five percent off, but standard RRP over the last thirty days has to be five pounds for these to be accepted and to go live. 

So what are some of our top tips for deal success? Use the recommended ASINs. These recommendations update weekly, so do not wait to take action if you see a product eligible to be in promoted deal events as it might disappear the following week. Promote your top and most profitable products. Running a promotion is your opportunity to wow Amazon shoppers. Focus on the top products to maximise your growth opportunities during the event and make sure products with the largest margin are included. This means you have the opportunity to provide deeper discounts on your products and continue to target high CPC keywords to help you stay visible during these key deal events. 

From our experience, we ran promotions for one of our clients on back catalogue products in 2023 and in 2024, we ran promotions on their top products. This led to a year-on-year uplift in deal revenue of plus two hundred and twenty four percent. Prep early. With Amazon deals usually requiring fifteen percent off your last thirty-day price, you need to try and make sure pricing has been consistent over the last thirty days so Amazon don't begin to ask for more funding to reach that fifteen percent off price. 

Prepping with stock is also crucial. Amazon will begin increasing their POs in the lead up to a deal event, so make sure you're able to provide the level of stock Amazon are requesting to ensure you have stock cover for the higher traffic over the deal event. Use high-quality images for your promotions. Ensure the images don't include any text, logos or watermarks that are not part of the product itself. If a promotion doesn't follow Amazon's product image requirements or is not representative of the product within the promotion, the promotion itself is subject to cancellation. 

Improve product detail pages. Inspire Amazon shoppers to purchase your product. Use bullet points, images, and A-plus content to share your brand message and unique product benefits. When a product is retail ready, this means that their listing has all the necessary information and details for the customer to fully understand what they're purchasing. This includes text content, imagery, video, A+, and a minimum of three and a half stars on the listing, making sure it's displayed in the most digestible way to attract buyers and ultimately get them to purchase your product quickly. 

A full funnel strategy. Make sure you're taking advantage of the advertising options available to you. For new brands, these will be key to helping you stand out in the crowded space throughout deal events. And finally, allow data to guide optimisations, not just with sponsored ads, but also with your listings. Conducting A-B tests on different elements of the detail pages can help to improve conversions and engagements in the lead-up and over the deal event. 

The impact of the Amazon phenomena combined with their marketing efforts and the habits now formed has led to customer interest in deal events climbing way ahead of the event, meaning that a lead up to the deal then is almost as important as the event itself, as it gives you the opportunity to build up visibility for your products and brand when consumers are browsing and researching what they might want to purchase when the deal event comes around. 

So if we look at the graphic here, we can see there are three stages to the deal event. We begin with the build-up. In Q4, deal searches start even seven weeks ahead of the event, showing that consumers begin browsing ahead of the event to find and plan out what they want to purchase. The craze. This is when traffic is at its peak and competition is at its strongest on the platform, with vendors trying to convert as much of the traffic as they can. And finally, the last call. This is when traffic is at its lowest after the event, but retargeting any consumers who have missed the event is strong, along with retargeting consumers who bought from you to try and encourage them to become loyal to your brand. 

So how do we look to prepare through ads for a deal period ahead? We use a ramp-up and phase-out strategy to provide a structured approach which involves two distinct phases, ramping up and phasing out. This is used to introduce, sustain and gradually reduce advertising efforts in a planned manner. Here's a holistic view on how we activate a ramp-up and phase-out strategy. For the ramp up, our objective is to build awareness, generate interest, and create demand. As we saw on the previous slide, deal event interest starts weeks in advance with a specific spike two weeks prior to the event. This strategy focuses on the two weeks prior, therefore. 

To build awareness, generate interest and create demand, we firstly upweight our awareness and consideration spend so we can showcase USPs and differentiate from competition. We then expand our sponsored ads to our own aisle, meaning we have visibility everywhere. The week before the deal event, we gradually increase bids and within that, launch views remarketing within our sponsored ads. And immediately before the event, we switch our focus to conversion campaigns. 

Over the peak, our objective is to capture all the demand created in the ramp-up and drive purchase. To drive purchase, we focus on conversion and loyalty campaigns. We also increase our budget to capture the increased traffic. This means more attention and more reinforcement of our brand presence and therefore more conversion opportunity. And finally, the phase-out stage, which is immediately after the event. Our objective here is to re-engage potential new-to-brand purchasers, encouraging repeat purchase from those who trialled in the event and upselling our wider product range. We also look to cut budgets and bids to protect spend and increase proportion of spend on loyalty to meet objective of the lead-out, this being re-engaging new-to-brand consumers and encouraging that repeat purchase. 

Amazon ran a new-to-brand customer growth lift study in 2023, which showed that using Amazon deals or ads separately through a two point one times increase in new-to-brand consumers. However, when using both deals and Amazon ads in tandem, there was a two-point-nine times increase in new-to-brand consumers, which shows the value of leveraging Amazon advertising tools alongside promotional deals to maximise new customer acquisition. So that's all from deal preparation and how you can do it on both the vendor side and through advertising. If you have any further questions on how to prepare for deal events or for general Amazon updates, please reach out to me on LinkedIn by scanning the QR code here. 

Paul Sonneveld
That's great. Thank you, Sam. That was a fantastic overview of how to prepare for deal events, how to make the most of it. And there's something about your graphics that I really like. Maybe it's the colours, maybe it's the lines, but fantastic. Thank you for that. We do have a couple of questions here before we hand off to our broader Q&A session, but just a couple of ones here. I'm going to start with a couple of my own here. I think many, many small brands will face this situation, right? If I'm a small brand, small budgets, how do I decide between do I fund deals or do I fund the advertising? You know, how do I choose and how do I create that trade-off? 

Sam Adams
Yeah, it's a good question because both sides of it can really, really support any small brand. From previous experience with smaller brands, I find general peaks come even without having any deal support there, but with just advertising. But the key thing is over deals is having that deal banner, which is what a lot of consumers are going to be looking for when they're searching the platform. So my opinion, deals, if possible, best deals or Lightning Deals, if those of you are able to apply, should work best for you there, just because it allows you to cut through a lot of the other brands, potentially similarly around you, who don't have the budget to really cut through what they're doing and stay visible compared to other competitors of yours. 

Paul Sonneveld
Thank you for that. Let me go to a question here from Luke. Luke was very active in giving us some questions here. Here we go. I've got a long list here from Luke. Here we go. I think very relevant for vendors. In a hybrid situation, as a vendor, you're selling across both 1P and 3P. I think that's the context here. And Luke, feel free to jump in if I've got that wrong. Would you encourage to only run 3P deals or only on 3P lines? Or do you do it across both? Like, is there a hybrid dimension to the deal execution question. 

Sam Adams
I think it's very dependent on category your catalogue as well what products you choose as I've mentioned earlier, when running deals on back catalogue versus top products we saw a significant change. So, I think it's very important to decide what type of deals and what type of products you want to put on there first. I think a hybrid perspective can work if it's the best way to work it for you. But in my opinion, I think it's easier to keep it all consolidated on one side if you have products on both sides, because you're able to build that traction across all products you have and able to see it in one consolidated space. 

Paul Sonneveld
And you asked another one in terms of, I guess, more of the broader trends that we are seeing, right? And I think we're seeing different things. Certainly, I've seen different people commenting on LinkedIn, and I appreciate that's not always a great indicator of what's really going on. But what are your thoughts on the year-on-year declines in the performance of some of these key events, particularly versus last year? Are you worried about the traffic declines that Amazon's 

Sam Adams
I think it's interesting because Prime Day is a prime example of this. The traffic over Prime Day was certainly down. And from what I noticed in the categories I work in, it wasn't just us. A lot of the clients I work with are wired. It was just us. But when looking at the category data, for example, one category I work in the grocery category, the July was the second lowest month of so far which shows that it's not just per brand but it's a wider thing. And I think Amazon are struggling because I know Paul, you mentioned about LinkedIn and seeing things on there, but I also think it's important to notice the lack of things we saw on LinkedIn after Prime Day as well.

A lot of the time, you do see brands and people shouting about their performance over Prime Day, but with this Prime Day recently, there was much less of that. So, I do certainly think Amazon are trying to work hard on this and with other times you've seen on the vendor side specifically them trying to work different ways in terms of deals, SOA funding some things like that Amazon are trying to work in different ways to try and build up the traffic and the hype for these upcoming deal events So I think, yes, Amazon are slightly panicking with the considerable traffic, but I think they are working through different ways on the vendor side to try and bring it back up. 

Paul Sonneveld
Thank you, Luke. Appreciate your question there. And great answer there, Sam. Yuri has just come in with another question as well. His category is saturated with competitors who are constantly running deals. Are there any specific strategies to help my listings, Yuri's listings really stand out in search results? 

Sam Adams
So I think there's a lot of things you can do outside of deals. A lot of it will revolve around the listing page, the detail page itself. So that being your imagery, your content, your A+. Around deal times, yes, it is important to have that banner and that badge. When you're outside of deal events, consumers really are going to be looking more into what your PDPs are like. Do you have high-quality imagery? Is your text work there? using high traffic keywords which helped you to convert is your A+ high quality. Do you have a strong review count as well. So, I think if you really nailed down all the basics and the key points of being retail-ready, you should be able to help yourself stand out without having deals active. 

Paul Sonneveld
Thanks for your question, Yuri. And thanks for, appreciate the answer there too, Sam. I want to go back to some of the other questions here, which was, let me just make sure, where do I wrote them down? Here we go. I guess from a vendor point of view, what are the deal types you'd recommend if you don't have access to AVS or a Vendor Manager? 

Sam Adams
I would say, again, it's dependent on the product type and what you're trying to do. For best deals, I think overall they will be the best for you. As I mentioned previously, you can put these on a wider range of products. You're able to have these active for longer as well as much stronger visibility versus lightning deals, which you don't have control over the time they're active. They're only active for a twelve-hour period. 

So in my opinion, best deals would be better for the longer term, trying to grow revenue. But if it is a situation where you're looking to push through stock that's potentially aging, or you need to get moving, a lightning deal can really help with the level of urgency they provide. With consumers being able to see how long it's left, how much they have, how much stock is left as well. So that's a really good way of trying to push through stock. But overall, I would suggest best deals is the best way to utilise the deal types you have without having an AVS or VM. 

Paul Sonneveld
And probably the last question here, and I've run out, I'm restricted to two hundred characters here, so it's not completely there yet, but how do I ensure that my deals will still go live, and I won't need to provide more funding with a potential issue of Amazon price matching, right? My products in lead up really about, you know, Amazon sort of interfering with the price establishment before the discount kicks in. How do you manage that situation to make sure that sort of you come in for the landing kind of nicely and you get a great strong execution on the deal? 

Sam Adams
Yeah, so in my opinion, the answer to this starts way before the deal event even begins in terms of your general deal planning for the year ahead. If you're selling your product outside of Amazon as well, it would be really important to try and create a holistic strategy between all the different e-retailers you use to make sure that their price point doesn't impact your price point on Amazon. I work with vendors who work with e-retailers and have had their price slash significantly well below what the price is because they weren't planning ahead with a holistic strategy for all their e-retail sites. 

So in my opinion, this happens much earlier on, this planning with a holistic strategy across all your e-retailers and building out a promotional calendar across all sites, so you know when it's going to go on promotion or discount where, and especially if you're able to put a block over the key deals or deal events on Amazon. Prime day, make sure Amazon is always going to be the lowest price, and no other e-retailers are combating in the lead up to that. Black Friday, as well, a lot of retailers actually start their deals well before Amazon do and potentially even the whole month as well, which makes it really difficult. But it's also about that planning ahead and making sure that what their discount is isn't going to be as steep or as significant compared to what yours is. So you can always be below that threshold price. 

Paul Sonneveld
Thank you very much, Sam. That was great. Short, sharp, punchy, packed with lots of practical advice. So thank you. Thank you so much. I hope you do stay around for our panel discussion. We are going to take a couple of minutes' break, probably a four-minute break, before we return with a panel session. That just helps us to get the questions organised and make sure we're all ready to go. So if you haven't submitted your question, please do that now. Use that QR code right above my head there. And I look forward to seeing you in about three minutes as we kick off our panel discussion. And thank you again, Sam. 

Sam Adams
Thanks for having me, Paul. Cheers.