The festive season will shortly be upon us and with that comes plenty of Christmas shopping! Let’s take a look at how you can maximise your sales on Amazon this Christmas.

The Amazon Growth Guide - How to Maximise Your Amazon Sales This Christmas

December is always going to be a busy time for Amazon retailers, with 2020 being far from an exception! With lockdown boosting sales on Amazon by 40% this year, the platform has seen a huge boom in usage while customers have been stuck indoors. While this is bad news for the high street, retailers with a presence on the platform should be doing all they can to prepare for the busy Christmas shopping season.

Why prepare for Christmas?

Getting ahead and preparing for Christmas will not only benefit you during December but help increase sales during other busy seasonal events.

While Christmas has always been a busy time, in the modern world retailers see two big events ahead of the big day itself – Black Friday and Cyber Monday. With big discounts usually available, shoppers often use these key dates to tick items off their gift buying list, so not being prepared can lead to missed sales opportunities.

Giving customers a good experience of your product pages will also work in your favour later on in the festive season, as they will be more likely to return to pages and retailers who made shopping easy on what can be a pretty hectic day.

How to spot seasonality for your products?

It’s important to take the time to notice seasonal trends within your product sales, particularly if you are managing a large catalogue of items that could need changing. It’s far better to take more time optimising the products you know sell well in December than to make superficial optimisations across the board.

You can use your business reports within Seller Central to identify any sales uplift among individual SKUs. Filtering down your data to November/December of last year will help you identify which products saw an uplift and that you should be focusing on.

Other ways to identify seasonality for your products include;

• Using search volume data to identify interest in your product categories
• Checking out known competitors and seeing what changes they’ve been making to their storefront and product pages
• Putting yourself in the mind of your consumer – would you be more interested in your products at this time of year?

How to adjust your listings for seasonal events

While you’ve been making optimisations throughout the year to rank highly for standard product terms, it’s now time to go the extra mile and give your listings a festive touch. You should be updating the keywords you use to reflect seasonality and adding these to your title and back end search terms.

Make sure you’re selecting keywords that customers are searching for this time of year: using terms like ‘ideal Christmas gift’, ‘gifts for women’, ‘gifts for men’ will all help products rank organically even when the search terms aren’t product-specific.

You should also include these keywords within your product descriptions and take the time to explain how your product would be used at Christmas. Developing your A+ content to reflect the seasonal shopper will also be a big help in securing those all important Christmas sales.

How to Create Seasonal A+ Content

We already know that putting the time in to create A+ Content for your product pages will increase sales, but you should also be making some seasonal changes to really give you an edge over the competition.

You can do this with a few simple changes, such as;

• Applying seasonal copy into the descriptions - eg. “This is an ideal Christmas gift for men”
• Updating your keywords to include seasonal terms
• Changing your colour scheme to warm colours to evoke a ‘Christmassy’ feeling, such as red, dark green, gold and navy blue

• Changing your lifestyle creative to festive imagery, helping your customer imagine the product as a gift (if you are working last minute, you can use stock images to help with this)

ClickThrough Tip: unfortunately, changing your product titles and copy is a manual process and you won’t be able to revert changes at the click of a button. To make sure you don’t lose any key optimisations you’ve made on your year-round content, save a version to copy and paste back in after the festive season!

Creating a Seasonal Storefront

This year, Amazon deployed a new feature allowing merchants to create limited time secondary storefronts. These are great for events such as Christmas and Black Friday, but you can also use them to promote limited time deals throughout the rest of the year.

A seasonal storefront will help users navigate around specific pages, easily find seasonal products, or view important information, like last postal dates (which we’ll get onto shortly!). You can also use a seasonal storefront to present users with curated gift guides or featured deals, making your products easily accessible.

How to create your seasonal storefront:

1. Click the Version drop-down menu at the top of the page and click create new version

2. Enter a name for the new version

3. Select an existing version to use as a starting point (this enables you to stay faithful to previous branding and give customers a sense of familiarity with a festive touch)

4. Click edit now to make changes on the new version

5. Select the start/end date and then submit for publishing eg. 1^st Dec – 22^nd/23^rd

Your storefront will need to be approved by Amazon, but if it’s rejected they’ll provide you with clear reasons why.

What are the Key Dates for Christmas?

Make sure you’re clear to your customers on the last possible delivery dates for your products. We all know how frustrating it can be to still be waiting on a delivery come Christmas day, but advertising your last shipping dates ensures your customers are clearly informed ahead of time.

We’ve included the last delivery dates for Amazon, Royal Mail, Parcelforce, and DPD below but ensure you check with your own couriers to make sure you’re giving customers the right information.

Amazon

Royal Mail

Other Third Party Shipping

What’s next?

Are you worried that you won’t deliver, and that you’ll end up on the naughty list?

You can join ClickThrough’s next Amazon Growth Guide webinar – Using Reporting To Deliver Better Campaigns - and you will receive a free 1 hour consultation with one of our experts.

Or, download our new eBook on How to Create the Perfect Amazon Product Page for specialist insight into how you can easily optimise your product pages all year round!