Guide to Amazon’s 2021 Holiday Season

Caroline Powell Author
11 min read

In eCommerce, we’ve been considering Amazon’s holiday season for months now. Planning inventory, strategizing sales and discounts, staffing…the list goes on. While there’s a lot that you need to do far in advance, you can prepare for the 2021 holiday season with this simple checklist. Everything here is still attainable, regardless of the fact that we’ve already kicked off Q4.

Key Dates

For more dates and to check for any variation in your active marketplaces, be sure to review Amazon’s Holiday Guide.

It’s also important to take note of the important holidays during this time as they can affect a lot, from shopping trends to customer service availability. 

Now that your calendar is planned, let’s get into some tactics and strategies for making the most of your business for the 2021 holiday season. 

Holiday Clean Up

Consumers are buying earlier and earlier for the holidays. The more they can spread out the shopping, the less of a financial burden it is at one single time. Thus, you need to make sure your account is optimized from top to bottom as soon as Q4.

A regular account clean up should be part of your healthy habits, but now is the time to do it if you’ve been neglecting this step.

To get the most of the holiday sales spike, you want to focus on cleaning up a few parts of your account:

Listings

This should come as no surprise to you. Listings need to be optimized for the holidays. This does not mean that you should be optimizing for keywords like “Christmas” or “Black Friday”. It means that you should adapt to the change in shopper behaviors.

The holiday shopping season is when people are more likely to shop for others rather than themselves. They’re looking for “gift ideas”. Pepper in seasonal or holiday-related keywords to your bullet points and description (but don’t try to win these keywords). 

Pro Tip: Look at your competitors’ listings. Find common threads in their one- and five- star reviews to target in your listings. 

A+ Content

Spruce up your A+ Content! We have seen brands take advantage of this space, talking about how the product makes a perfect gift idea or stocking stuffer. However, don’t forfeit the quality or your brand just to make the A+ Content look seasonal and festive. 

Make sure your A+ Content is different from the images you’ve used at the top of your listing. Reusing the same images will not do you any favors. This is an additional opportunity to show off your product and use lifestyle images. Don’t waste the space with content you’ve already shared.

Amazon Stores

Much like your A+ Content, get creative with your Store! Much like a bricks and mortar store might put up lights or tinsel or a menorah, you can “decorate” your Store to welcome shoppers in! 

Need help creating your A+ Content or Amazon Storefront?

Our Managed Services team can do it! There’s still time to get seasonal content up and running before the holidays, but don’t wait much longer. Talk to one of our reps today!

Advertising

We’ll get into some strategic planning in just a bit, but you also want to make sure your advertising campaigns are cleaned up and cleaned out before the holiday season. Take the time to purge keywords that aren’t serving you. 

If you’re creating new campaigns specific to particular holidays or products, take advantage of Seller Labs PRO’s Campaign Groups. You can easily see how well your holiday campaigns are performing. 

Inventory

Now that your account is nice and cleaned up, it’s time to make sure your inventory is ready. We know that there will be supply chain issues this quarter, so you need to be prepared early.

If you don’t already, consider adding a Merchant-Fulfilled option to your listing. Amazon is increasing the minimum IPI scores, which can decrease your number of available inventory slots to submit. Don’t let Amazon dictate how many products you can sell. 

As you’re leading up to the holidays, offload some lower-performing inventory with flash sales to make more room for your top-performing products. You can also implement auto-pricing to slow the sales between restocks as things get settled at different fulfillment centers. 

Need help managing your inventory? Start a free 30-day trial of Seller Labs PRO today to stay on top of your product catalog at all times.

Product Reviews

In case you didn’t know it, now is not really the time to launch a new product. However, if it’s part of your business strategy, ensure that you are getting product reviews! Shoppers need that social proof (yes, even from strangers) to know whether or not they should buy your product.

Additionally, don’t get complacent with old reviews. Amazon defaults the sorting of product reviews to “Top Reviews.” However, it’s becoming more common for shoppers to switch to “Recent Reviews.” If you don’t have recent reviews, or a large portion of your recent reviews are negative, that does not look good to buyers. Keep a steady stream of positive reviews coming in with automated messaging from Seller Labs PRO.

Deal Strategies

The deadline for submitting Cyber 5 promotional deals may have passed, but there is still so much that you can do. Coupons and Promotions can still be created, almost all the way up to Thanksgiving Day. 

Make sure your deal strategies extend beyond Amazon. You should be using the power of your social networks or email lists to drive traffic and increase conversions on your listings. Additionally, coupons to a community that already knows you will help build loyalty and increase your number of repeat buyers. 

Advertising

Amazon advertising is getting more expensive, so sellers have to be more strategic with how they allocate their budget. It’s fun to try the new placements, but it’s also very easy to throw money away when you do that. Be strategic in how you invest and test with your advertising budget.

Within reason, maybe try some festive Sponsored Brand Ads. These ad campaigns can’t be overtly festive and do have to end on the respective holiday, but it’s a fun way to try and get some more eyeballs on your brand during the peak search period. 

One piece of advice we always give to our clients: Don’t try to advertise on words or phrases like “Christmas gift”. It will be expensive, and it’s likely to yield less than desirable results. Focus your campaigns on unique selling points of your products and how people might come across them naturally. Use the ASINs in your search term reports to discover new keywords or products for your targeting ads. 

Want expert help?

If you need help or want our team of experts to manage your advertising for you, just ask! Our team is standing by to help, and there’s no cost to starting a conversation.

Advice from Amazon Experts

As part of our goal to get you prepared for the 2021 Amazon holiday season, we asked the experts in our Managed Services team to share one piece of advice for brands. Remember, these experts work with brands each and every day, providing strategic advice and keeping a thumb on all of Amazon’s updates. This is a gold mine of advice.

What is one piece of advice you would give to Amazon sellers going into the 2021 holiday season?

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