Amazon offers plethora of tools to help sellers launch, promote & effectively market products in order to maximize sales and revenue. Discounts and promotions are a powerful marketing tools that allow Amazon sellers to gain more customers and in turn increase sales. Promotions allows you to offer incentives to potential buyers in quickly reaching their purchase decision. At this moment, Amazon Australia offers two types of promotions namely Percentage Off & Buy One – Get One.
What are the Promotions?
Promotions can help your products stand out from the competition and stimulate sales. However, promotions are most effective when your offer is Buy Box winner otherwise the promotion is not displayed on the product page rendering your efforts ineffective.
When to create a promotion
Consider creating a promotion when business is slow so that you can motivate both existing and new customers to buy. You can also distinguish your offer from the competition and encourage existing customers to try new products. Successful promotions motivate customers to buy your product. To run an effective promotion, consider the following guidelines:
- The customer must know about it. Consider running social media campaigns to drive traffic to your promotion.
- It is time-sensitive. Customers respond to limited time offers when they face the possibility of missing the offer. Experiment with the duration, depending on your product.
- It offers sufficient value to influence the customer’s choice. Track current sales and gather feedback to really figure out what offers your potential customers find more attractive. Then you will have some solid understanding to be able to refine your promotions accordingly.
Percentage Off Promotion
You can offer a percentage discount on your entire catalog or a subset of it. The percentage discount being offered must be between 1% & 99%. The discounted product can be same as the one being purchased or it can be the any other product.
Buy One, Get One
This promotion is used to offer a customer 1 or more items for free after each other item they purchase. This can be an effective promotion to speed up the sales of a slow selling product.
How to create a promotion? To create a promotion, follow simple steps as laid out in Create Promotion | Amazon Seller Central
Restrictions on Promotion Creation
Amazon requires the promotion to follow the various terms and condition as laid out in its terms, however few of the basic restrictions on promotions are:
- Promotions must run for at least 24 hours
- You must have a minimum of 10 units in stock per ASIN
- If you are using claim codes as part of a promotion, ensure that you understand the Claim codes and combinability help page.
- Books, Music, Video, and DVD (BMVD) products are excluded from promotions.
- Alcohol: Excluded from all promotions.
Concluding Thoughts
Promotions are effective method to promote your new / slow selling products but for an effective strategy, you will need to go deeper than running the promotions only. You need to understand and employ the various marketing strategies that I have included in my book: Start Selling in Amazon Australia
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