21 Amazon Selling Tips for the Holiday Season

There are a ton of Amazon selling tips floating around the internet. Who has time during this busiest season of the year to read, sort, and apply them all?

Because you’re serious about crushing the  holiday season, we’ve summarized the gist of all the great Amazon selling tips for you. By applying this shortlist, you can make this season your most profitable yet.

Personal Preparation

Based on the numbers, you are in a position to make more money this year than last. Amazon has seen a consistent increase in sales year over year. You must prepare to ride this wave, however, if you want a bigger slice of the pie.

Set up each of these areas before the holiday rush begins. They’re also great Amazon selling tips for optimizing operations throughout the year.

1.  Be Proactive

What are you going to need this holiday season?

The first of our Amazon selling tips is vital to making everything else work. It centers around your understanding of what needs to change on your end before you start changing anything else.

If you work with partners or hired help, meet with them as soon as possible. Tell everyone to bring reports with them that show data related to the areas they’re working in. Someone should also be assigned to bring reports that reflect how last year’s holiday sales went. Discuss the numbers and what everyone needs to maximize holiday sales this year.

2.  Prepare for Vacations

Who’s going to be off work, and when?

It’s important to know who is and isn’t going to be around on certain days throughout the fourth quarter. Extend that into January, too, so you don’t run into issues wrapping up the holiday season.

Anyone who isn’t going to be around – including you! – needs to let everyone else know at least two weeks in advance. Ideally, everyone should give 4 weeks’ notice. This is so that there’s enough time during this very busy season to find replacements if necessary and to make other needed adjustments.

Make it clear that even if it’s just a few hours here and there, they still need to keep everyone informed. The last thing you want to be doing is chasing people down when you need to stay focused on rocking sales and customer service.

This is one of the less-known Amazon selling tips, so keep it in mind. The holiday season is super busy because everything has to run much faster while properly processing a much higher volume. Losing someone for even a couple of hours can cause serious trouble.

3.  Ensure Open Communication

How can we all stay in close communication throughout the season?

This is moot if you’re a one-man show, but you really shouldn’t be if you want to make the most of the holiday buying frenzy. So, assuming you’ll have some help to manage everything, you need to establish open communication protocols.

Open Channels

Find out how everyone can best keep in touch. Although all being on one channel would seem the most efficient, you should always have backup options. At FreeeUp, we mostly rely on Skype, Viber, and WhatsApp. Some prefer email, Facebook messenger, and mobile phones. These are just examples. The channels you choose need to be the ones that are the most accessible. The point is to ensure that you can always reach each other and respond quickly.

Get on the same page about how everyone can reach everyone they need to. Stress the importance of keeping these channels active. You need to know immediately where everyone is during the rush.

Information Sharing

Have everyone send updates, too, about everything they’ve done that day before they sign off. This helps you stay on top of everything and helps others know where things left off and what to do next.

Encourage open, honest feedback and have everyone report any issues they’re having immediately. Everyone needs to be the best help they can be to everyone else to make the most of holiday sales.

4.  Stay Healthy

No matter how busy everything gets, staying healthy needs to be at the top pf everyone’s list.

This goes for you and everyone else who’s helping out.

The holiday season is also the season for runny noses, sore throats, congested lungs and aching bodies. Make sure that everyone is getting enough rest, good food, and the vitamins they need. Most importantly, make sure they’re not stuck in their chairs all day, every day. Keep moving to ward off stress and exercise your body.

This is another one of the Amazon selling tips that needs to happen if you want things to run smoothly. When people get sick, they are less productive and less accurate. Plus, you won’t get any advanced notice. This can really mess up your holiday success plan. The best thing to do is prevent it.

Business Preparation

From Black Friday to Christmas, shopping is going to get crazy. This is an opportunity to increase eCommerce sales past what you made last holiday season. If you want to make a killing, you need to make sure your business can handle the chaos.

As you dig into each of the following Amazon selling tips, decide whether your time is best spent handling them yourself or if you should hire someone who can get it done faster, better, and/or more economically.

5.  Optimize your Listings

All the Amazon selling tips that follow hinge on having well-optimized product listings.

Make sure that your listings are in optimal condition before you explore any of the other tips below. Even if you end up not using any of the tips below, you should still tweak your listings to improve your chances of making sales this season.

Look through your listings and correct any errors you see. Update your product photos if you can – even small improvements can go a long way. Make sure all the content is organized in the way that makes it the most appealing and the easiest for shoppers to get the information they want. Check your keywords, too, and update them to be optimally set for holiday searches.

6.  Tweak your Pricing Strategy

You need to be active with your pricing every single day during the holiday season.

Things move so much faster in Q4 than at any other time of the year. You need to constantly monitor your pricing versus the competition if you want to stay ahead. You don’t need to do a lot with unique private label products, but you will have to be vigilant wherever there are other sellers involved. Similar items with lower prices will always attract more sales.

Develop a clear strategy for monitoring and adjusting your pricing over the holiday season. Then make sure you have someone who will be implementing this strategy on a daily basis. You can hire someone or use a repricer, or both. A few repricers to look into are Seller Snap, Informed, Feedvisor, Repricer Express, and Channel Advisor Amazon Repricing.

Whatever you decide, the key is to focus on a strategy that works for your business, and that you can realistically implement throughout the holiday season.

7.  Use Pay Per Click Advertising

You should not be without Amazon PPC advertising during this most lively shopping season.

PPC gives you a very valuable edge when it comes to visibility. Even if you don’t normally use PPC, you should look into leveraging Sponsored Products Ads during the holidays.

PPC works well to increase eCommerce sales by directing sales to you instead of the competition. The key to making this a wise investment is having the right keywords. Sit down and figure out what shoppers are going to type in when they want to buy your products. Organize these keywords logically into campaigns and set appropriate budgets for each one. Gather data, tweak your campaigns, and perfect them in time for the rush.

If PPC is new to you, check out these Amazon PPC tips, and consider outsourcing to a PPC expert.

8.  Set Up Additional Traffic Sources

To beef up sales, you need to expand your reach.

Amazon has a huge customer base that you already have access to. But you can reach an even wider audience if you leverage other channels and drive that traffic to your Amazon listings.

Email Marketing

Use Messenger to reach new targets and capture emails. Amazon prohibits the collection of Amazon customer emails, but there’s a way to do it without breaking their terms of service. A good email list that you can grow is a valuable asset.

Advertising

Use Facebook Ads and influencer marketing to reach this massive platform’s user base. You can also set up Google Ads and use other social channels like LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube – as long as they work for your products.

Landing Pages

At this stage, we would be remiss if we didn’t include landing pages in our Amazon selling tips. Off-Amazon traffic is unfiltered traffic. It can be either really good or really bad. The key here is to make sure that you are only sending high converting traffic to your Amazon listings. Otherwise, you hurt your conversion rates.

The best system is to send raw traffic to a landing page that you’ve specifically set up for this purpose, and specifically for the holidays. You must qualify your traffic to make your leads purchase-ready before you send them to Amazon. You also want to capture their contact details before you turn them over to Amazon.

9.  Give Discounts

Giving people an incentive to buy always works.

Aside from the incentives you give outside traffic in exchange for an email, you can set up coupons and other discounts for your listings. This attracts more attention and can also be used to encourage upsells and cross-sells.

Include promo codes on your landing pages to encourage visitors to convert. Make them available to shoppers who add more to their carts. Use them in every way possible to increase the chances of a sale. Just make sure that you always follow each platform’s terms!

10. Engage your Targets

Keep the conversation going with potential, lost and existing customers.

Communicate information that will be interesting to them over the holiday season, like the deals you are offering and how your products can make the season brighter. Email, social media campaigns are the best ways of doing this. Just remember to be personable and know your targets so you can respect them and offer only valuable information.

11.  Monitor Conversion Rates

Check your conversions daily.

If you haven’t set up any kind of tracking, then do this immediately! You can try a tool like SellerApp.

Conversion rates not only get you more sales, but they improve your performance metrics so you can get even more sales. Your conversion rates are so important that any Amazon selling tips rundown that doesn’t take them into account is not worth your time.

If conversions are low, then you need to do some conversion rate optimization. This begins with your product page, but there are a lot of other strategies to employ. Consider hiring experienced help to give you the best suggestions based on your specific needs and to implement the recommended changes.

Hiring Help

The holidays are always a crazy time for online businesses. It doesn’t have to make you want to pull your hair out, though. Possibly the most useful Amazon selling tips we can offer are the ones around hiring help to lessen your load and get an infusion of expertise without spending too much.

You can automate holiday eCommerce operations with tools. However, you can further cut down the time you have to spend and increase the infusion of expertise when you hire experienced freelancers. Below are the most helpful freelancers for the holiday season – and beyond.

12.  Keyword Researcher

Running PPC campaigns is draining. It takes a lot of knowledge and time. You can better maximize your sales over the holidays by hiring an experienced Amazon keyword researcher. They will know how things work on the platform so you get the best keywords for your listings and campaigns.

13.  Advertising Manager

You may have some experience running Amazon PPC campaigns. Still, no one can do it better than someone who does it for a living. They will be focused on this type of work and can, therefore, get you better results. And this is what makes the investment in paid advertising worthwhile.

Don’t forget to discuss your specific holiday campaign expectations with anyone you hire. Make sure they have access to any existing data so they can draw up the most efficient plan of action to optimize your holiday campaigns.

14.  Listing Optimizer

You can do the listing updates yourself, but this takes a lot of valuable time. You need help, especially if you have a lot of holiday systems and processes to put in place. And most importantly, if you’re not an expert.

You want your products to have maximum visibility, so optimization is best left to an experienced optimizer. They can identify faster what elements need tweaking, and will be less likely to miss anything important.

15.  Copywriter

It’s not as simple as it seems to update your listing titles, bullet points, descriptions and image alt tags. You’ll need an expert to really get things right to boost both organic visibility and PPC campaign performance.

A copywriter who focuses on Amazon listings knows how to highlight your products’ features while incorporating keywords in a smooth fashion and giving visitors all the information they need quickly.

16.  Graphic Designer

If you’re updating lifestyle product photos and using off-Amazon traffic channels, you’re going to need great graphics. Unprofessional graphics are a huge turnoff to today’s discriminate shoppers – especially Amazon customers.

Hire a designer to do up graphics for your social media and email campaigns. This way, your graphics will meet platform standards and grab the attention you need to increase conversions.

17.  Social Media Manager

Marketing and advertising on socials are more than just typing up a few lines here and there. There’s a whole culture and strategy to doing it right. Random posts and comments will get you nowhere.

A social media manager knows what works on different platforms. The type of content and timing are vital. They can even work with a copywriter to tweak and optimize text and visuals. They will also know how to best respond to any interaction. Most importantly, they will have dedicated time to keep a close watch on your campaigns so they can respond to inquiries and tweak campaigns as needed.

18.  Inventory Manager

Managing inventory takes loads of time as well as analytical abilities. You need someone who can monitor inventory to determine what level of supply of which products you need to cover the holiday rush.

Remember that having too much of one product and too little of another will hurt your Amazon business. An inventory manager will make sure that you have just the right stock levels to meet customer demand – and maybe even get discounts on FBA storage fees!

19.  Supplier Manager

A big part of getting the right number of products when you need them is having good supplier relationships and timely communication. A supplier manager will know the most current lead times and when to submit purchase orders to get the fastest responses. They also know the best shipping options to use based on your business and suppliers’ setups. This goes a long way to getting inventory shipped and received in a timely manner.

20.  Customer Service Representative

If you want to maximize holiday sales, you are definitely going to need extra help in the customer service department. More sales means more inquiries. During the holidays, however, customer complaints and requests for returns increase. This is related to the stress that the season brings, and people’s tendency to return unwanted gifts.

Hire customer service help to field all these messages so that you only have to deal with the more uncommon queries and higher-level issues. They will also come in very handy to cover your store 24/7, which you cannot possibly achieve throughout this busiest shopping season. Your customers will be happy, and this will keep your store healthy despite the chaos.

Make sure you have enough people to expertly cover Amazon Messages as well as all other channels you are using, like Messenger and email. They all have different approaches, so you want to hire the right person for each to communicate effectively.

21. Project Manager

This last of our 21 Amazon selling tips brings all the others together by keeping everything and everyone organized. A project manager acts as an extension of yourself as the business owner. Instead of getting bogged down with management responsibilities throughout the holiday season, you’ll have a project manager to keep things on track.

A project manager will be your single point of contact connecting all departments. They will handle all the details and just give you the gist of it all so that you can also stay organized.

Final Thoughts

The holiday season is expected to bring in more eCommerce sales than any previous holiday season. Getting yourself and your store set up with all the systems, tools and people you need is crucial to making the most of it.

Most of these Amazon selling tips can be effectively applied throughout the year, so you can take some time after the holiday rush to reexamine and trim the fat. The best thing about the online tools and freelancers of today is that you only need to pay for as long as you need them. You can evaluate what has proved useful and keep those while letting go of others without getting into trouble.

Take a few minutes now to target one of these Amazon selling tips. Think about your holiday pain points so you can start fixing them. Make it a goal to implement a plan of action ASAP, before you get sucked into the shopping frenzy.

If you’re not already a FreeUp client, take another few minutes to sign up so you can request the freelancers you need to get things streamlined faster.