Best Practices for Holiday Season Sales

Best Practices for Holiday Season Sales

  • 2021 Oct 13
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Managing inventory, orders, and customer interactions over the Holiday season sales may be very time-consuming. We’ve put up the following “best practices ‘ for successful selling to help you handle it all. 

Here are some suggestions to assist you in managing the Holiday selling crunch, from delighting your shoppers with excellent customer service to proactively controlling your inventory or coping with negative comments.

Keep an eye on your stock and orders

Proactively manage your inventories.

During hectic selling seasons, one of the most successful methods is to manage your inventory in advance. First, make sure you have adequate stock of your most popular items on hand. Maintain accuracy of amounts in Seller Central by verifying them at least once a day. Set the handling time (lead time-to-ship) within a reasonable range. Buyers may have a negative experience if handling times are unrealistic.

Match your items to the appropriate ASIN in our database. Increased buyer interactions, A-to-z Guarantee claims, or payment card chargebacks can all arise from mismatched listings. Your products must be identical to the product as displayed on the detail page. Products that are missing parts or components, faulty, or damaged cannot be listed. Identifying these discrepancies in the listing’s comments section is not permissible.

Remember that before any changes show on Amazon, all products in an inventory file upload must be processed. Therefore, if you have any modifications that are time-sensitive, submit them first in a separate inventory file.

Make engaging product detail pages.

Amazon cares to maintain a consistent appearance across all categories. Each category, however, has somewhat different criteria for how its items should be presented. Amazon’s category-specific templates are a handy resource for creating succinct, accurate, and engaging product information pages. 

Follow your orders regularly.

Don’t wait for the “Sold, ship now” mail to tell you that you have ordered. Orders should be checked regularly on your Seller Central account. New orders should be fulfilled daily.

Late confirmations may result in a negative consumer experience. Instead, confirm your orders on time.   When you confirm your orders, provide tracking numbers, carrier, delivery method, and service level information. Giving customers a way to track the status of their orders is essential to delivering excellent customer service.

Ship your orders as quickly as possible. This will allow you and the customer more chances to address any issues that may occur. If you’re shipping items from the same order in several packages, be sure to create separate packages when you confirm the shipments and provide a tracking number for each one.

If you’re a Professional seller, Amazon sends you an email when a large number of people are searching for a product you previously sold on Amazon. If you get one of these popular out-of-stock alerts, take advantage of the product’s current buyer demand and restock it for the Holiday season.

Offer a good customer experience.

Buyers would be delighted if you provided excellent customer service.

Provide exceptional customer service throughout the Holiday season sales to make a lasting impact on shoppers. Make it a point to answer all of their questions within 24 hours. Include “thank you” notes on packing slips to add a personal touch to orders. Follow Amazon’s communication standards when communicating with buyers, and resolve any issues quickly and correctly. Providing world-class service generally leads to positive feedback from customers. And that means that you can sell more when you have good reviews. 

Create Sponsored Products

It can be hard to make your Amazon listings stand out in a competitive Holiday market with so many offers and products. However, having your product advertisements appear on the first page of relevant search results can be the key to successful holiday season sales.

You bid for specific keywords in Amazon’s Sponsored Products ad program, and your ad appears on the first page of search results when an Amazon customer searches for one of these keywords. You only pay when a consumer clicks on your ad and views your product’s detailed page. Impressions are free in sponsored product ads.

Offer Promotions and free delivery

Promotions are quite popular among holiday shoppers. Customers look at the whole spectrum of promotional offers while buying online.

Provide express delivery options

During the holidays, customers focus heavily on quick delivery. Offering One-Day and Two-Day delivery may help you boost order volume by giving customers a few more days to make an order before the holiday. Set shipping costs for all product lines as well as non-BMVD (books, music, videos, and DVDs) items.

Provide gift services

Don’t get caught up in the debate about whether or not to provide gift services this holiday season sales. During the holidays, shoppers who want to put a personal touch on their purchases are searching for gift wrap options. 

Keep an eye on your stats and feedback.

Deal with negative reviews

You have to engage with the customer to settle any disagreements when you sell on Amazon. Communication is generally the key–just explaining a delay or assuring a customer will usually resolve most problems. However, there are some moments when a seller receives bad reviews from a customer.

The majority of sellers will get some bad comments at some point. Remember that a negative feedback rate of 0-2 percent is pretty acceptable for a store when that occurs to you. If your negative feedback rate is more than 5%, take a look at your company procedures to see if any operational issues may negatively impact a buyer’s experience. 

Remember that you can use the Feedback Manager to reply to feedback. However, before you do so, we highly recommend you contact the buyer and work together to fix the problems that have arisen. The feedback may be removed if the buyer believes it is reasonable. Learn more about how to remove negative feedback and how to raise your feedback rating.

Deal Returns, refunds, and A-to-Z Guarantee claims 

Respond to A-to-Z Guarantee claims and service chargebacks as soon as possible. Check your A-to-Z Guarantee claim pages daily and take steps to address any problems that arise. Follow our selling rules to avoid being held liable for the payment of a claim.

Check your consumer analytics frequently.

Your customer analytics show how you’re performing in terms of meeting Amazon’s performance goals. Monitor your Account Health Dashboard regularly to identify and address operational issues as soon as possible. Account suspensions and even account closures can result from high order defect rates (negative feedback, A-to-z Guarantee claims, and chargebacks). Check your feedback and A-to-Z Guarantee claim pages daily, and address any problems as soon as possible.

See Also: What is Revenue-Based Finance and How Does It Help Sellers Grow?

Make sure your account and security information is up to date

Make sure your seller account’s email contact information is up to date, and that Amazon email isn’t being blocked as spam by your email program or Internet service provider. In addition, make sure your credit card and bank account details are up to date in your account.

Check that your shop settings are up to date, and if you have one, show a customer service phone number.

Remember that Amazon policy prohibits you from displaying any version of your URL (such as.com, dot com, or.net) anywhere on the site.

Maintain a sense of safety and security.

Don’t give out your account password or email address to anybody you haven’t given permission to use it.   For all of your Amazon accounts, enable Two-Step Verification.

For your orders, only Amazon Marketplace Payments are accepted. If sellers participate in transactions outside of the Marketplace Payments by Amazon system, they are not safeguarded against transactions that may or may not be genuine.

If a customer requests that you ship to an address other than the one given by Amazon, you should cancel the transaction. After that, request that the customer make a new purchase with the proper address. Phishing (or spoofing) email is becoming a growing issue for everyone. These emails try to acquire sensitive information from you, such as your user account and password, which is then used to gain unauthorized access to your accounts. Remember that Amazon policy prohibits you from showing any part or version of your URL (such as.com, dot com, or.net) anywhere on the site.

See Also: 4 Excellent Tips For Amazon Halloween Sales

Conclusion 

While selling on Amazon, especially during hectic times like the Holiday season sales, it is difficult to catch every detail. Some of the practices are given above to ease your job in these times. 

Of course, following your inventory, offering a good level of experience for customers and customer satisfaction are important. However, repricing your products in this competitive environment is also essential. While the sale rates are very high during the Holiday season, it can be hard to manage your prices. 

Let Eva do this for you so that you can focus on the other time-consuming things like customer service, offering promotions, customer experience, etc. In addition, Eva tracks your inventory and helps you manage it. 

Besides all these, Eva is 15-day free to try! So give it a go now. Meet with an AI-Based Pricer and grow your business. 

Robert Runyon is the Director of Growth at Eva, a global tech company & Amazon services provider for growing 7/8-figure eCommerce brands. Robert has a background in B2B marketing, Amazon & 3rd party logistics, and runs the day-to-day marketing operations at Eva. He manages the marketing campaigns, publishes weekly podcast episodes & attends trade shows across the world taking pictures with thousands of people.

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