Lightning Deals are a great way to sell down inventory, for instance at the end of the season, or to push a product for a limited time. They’re featured on the Amazon Deals page, usually with the deepest discounts featured first (though other factors are also used in Amazon’s ranking algorithm).
So are Lightning Deals a great idea? Not necessarily.
For a start, you’ll need to create the deal at least 3 weeks in advance. The deal itself will only run for a few hours.
And Amazon is choosy. Not all products are eligible. You’ll see on Seller Central if your products are eligible or not.
Plus, competition is tough. Some weeks are already filled. You won’t be able to book a date if this is the case.
And it’s Amazon who decides exactly when your offer will run. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a weekday morning when everyone’s shopping over their cappuccino. If you’re unlucky, it will be a weekday morning – 2am to 6 am. If everyone’s asleep when your product shows, tough.
Plus, you’ll have to pay a fee, which varies (and can go to $500 a listing for Prime Day, for example) but will probably be around $150.
A Lightning Deal can give you a big boost – sales usually rise 50-60% on the day, and are still up after a week, but the impact fades away after that. So you need to do the math – figure out your gross profit per unit, and work out how many more units you need to sell to break even on the fee.
Lightning Deals are best for big selling products that you want to boost, or for higher priced products where you only need a few extra sales to pay off your investment.
If you use coupons, you don’t necessarily get quite the same impact on Amazon. But you don’t have to pay an upfront fee. Instead, you pay a 60 cent redemption fee for each coupon redeemed. For products that don’t make big daily sales, particularly if they are relatively low-ticket items, a coupon promotion is much more affordable than a flash sale.
If you use Vipon to handle your coupon offer, you can do even better, because you’ll access a base of 3m hard-core discount seekers and couponers. They won’t see the non-discounted offers on Amazon, because they only want things they can buy at a discount. And although there’s a fee for joining Vipon, you can use it for all your offers. If you have multiple products and want to make frequent promotions, for instance to clear the last of your stock on old products or to get new ones launched with a bang, this could work out much better for you than Amazon’s Lightning Deals.
It’s also more controllable. You decide how many items you want to coupon and the deal stays up until they’re gone – it won’t disappear in the early hours of the morning with no sales at all. Up to you. We like our way of doing things best. What do you think?
