Using Promotions as a Selling Tool

Question – How do I make my non-media products stand out through the Selling on Amazon program?  What tools do I use to offer special promotions to entice potential buyers?

One Answer – try the promotions tool in Seller Central. It’s a powerful feature that lets you control many aspects of the promotions you offer. Let’s review a bit about the why and the how.

hy use promotions? Customers love promotions because promotions offer discounts and ways to save money. Amazon.com found that one promotion, Super Saver Shipping (free shipping on orders over $25), made such an impact we decided to make it a permanent feature of our website. Customers come to Amazon.com, and return to Amazon.com, due in part to Super Saver Shipping.

From the seller point-of-view, promotions provide an opportunity to bring attention to a product or products, which may increase sales, thereby gaining sales history. Sales history is one factor used in determining search results and becoming eligible to win the buy box. See this recent post for more: PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER.

ow, then, do you start? You start with the promotions tool in Seller Central. To find this, go to the Inventory tab in Seller Central, click on the Advanced Features link on the navigation bar, and you’ll see the page below where one of the options is Manage Promotions.

When you click on that link you’ll land on the promotions tool page where all promotions start and are managed. If you haven’t created a promotion before, click on the Learn more about creating a new promotion link on the Create a New Promotion page for an in-depth look at everything you need to know about creating a promotion.

As you can see above, there are five steps to creating promotions, although these may vary based on the type of promotion:

1. Create a new promotion
2. Define qualifications
3. Define benefits
4. Create content
5. Review and submit promotion

Step 1: Creating promotion starts with choosing the type (examples below), establishing start and end dates, designating a tracking ID and internal description, and developing a claim code if desired.  Promotions types include:

• Fixed Amount Off (e.g. Spend $25 or more and receive $5 off)
• Percent Off (e.g. Spend $25 or more and receive 10%)
• Free Shipping (e.g. Spend $25 or more and get free shipping)
• Free Product (e.g. Buy two lipsticks and get a third free)
• Tiered Promotion (e.g. Tier 1: Buy 10 reams of paper and save 20%; Tier 2: Buy 30 reams or more of paper and save 50%)
• Fixed Price (e.g. Buy 3 for $10)

You’ll find that you can start with a simple promotion and get quite advanced with multiple promotions of different types running at the same time. In this case, you assign a number to each in order to define what order the system looks at the promotions.

Before going there, though, start with one simple promotion to see how it works for you. This is especially true for your fulfillment practices as it is important to evaluate how the information is delivered to you in the order and will be handled by your company. Once you offer a promotion, the buyer will expect to receive the full benefit of the promotion. Therefore, understanding the logic of the promotion is critical to the successful implementation.

Step 2: Defining the qualifications is where this logic comes into play. Examples of qualifications are a minimum purchase amount or quantity for all items in an order or specific catalog selections. You will be defining:

• What amount the customer must purchase
• Which items in your catalog are part of the promotion
• What items are excluded
• What text will display

Step 3: Defining the benefit means stating what the buyer gets out of the promotion. What is entered in the form depends on the promotion type. “Free shipping” might require identifying shipping types available, whereas “get a product free” would require identifying what product(s) are available for the offer.

Step 4: Creating content is where you decide what to display, or choose not to display anything at all. This might be a special promotion only for those that receive a claim code in a prior order, for example. You also have the option to explain further through terms and conditions that drives “Some restrictions apply” in a pop-up window. There will be some default information here to get you started.

Step 5: There will be a final display of everything from the previous settings pages with edit options if refining is needed. If all is ready, this is where the promotion is finally created.

Note: At the beginning, I said that one way to help differentiate your products is through promotions. Two other opportunities are to put the product on sale and to use accessory relationships.

• Sales are reduced pricing options that are managed through your product inventory uploads and last for a set amount of time. For example, the product is usually $10, but for this week only you want to lower the price to $8, so you’d use the sale option in your inventory upload tool.
• Accessory relationships are a cross-selling feature available in some categories. For more information see: What to Expect When Selling on Amazon.com – The Drill Down: Accessory Relationships

If you are looking for more ideas about increasing sales, try any of these features and for more tips go to the Increase Sales help topic in Seller Central.

-Cathi

UPDATE 4-17-09: To see orders that had promotions applied, use the Order Report function in Seller Central. Using the promotions tool will trigger a change that adds columns to both that report and the Settlement report that will identify the promotion used. Learn how to Download Order Reports.

ADDED 5-6-09: For additional help there is a video tutorial overview of promotions in Seller Central. Click the link or navigate to Seller Central help and choose the Video Workshop link in the upper right corner.

 

Comments

[bl]

Very helpful. Hope to see more of these types of posts. I never used the promotions tool but will consider it now.

[Giuseppe Taibi]

I am an Amazon Seller and recently launched my first promotion but I cannot find an easy way to track how many items I have sold through the promotion. Could you please provide details on how to track the items sold with a certain promotion code ?