When is the best time to use a discount offer? We could easily say ‘all the time’, but there are certain times when having a special offer on Amazon will deliver the greatest benefit to your business.
For instance, around holidays, you’ve got a lot more people shopping, looking for ideas for gifts. This might not help you much if you sell dehumidifiers or cleaning products, but even if your product isn’t usually ‘giftware’, you could benefit from having a discount offer just before the holiday.
Thanksgiving, the winter holiday season, mothers’ day, and fathers’ day, are all good times to push your products into the foreground. You don’t need to take a lot of money off – just a 5% offer will get your products to stand out from your competitors. Don’t forget celebration days that are meaningful to your particular customer base – International Cat Day, veterans’ commemorations, Black history month, or International Women’s Day.
Equally, the big Amazon days like Black Friday and Prime Day can be good times to select some of your products for a discount promotion. Everyone is looking for savings. This can be a good time to get your stock moving, perhaps on some of your higher-end products (do the math properly and you’ll have extra volume that’s high enough to compensate for the loss of margin).
The way Amazon’s algorithms work, it can be difficult to get new products off to a good start. That’s another good time to use a discount offer or coupons, to get your product a bit of attention right at the start. It’s particularly useful because you don’t want to reduce your price permanently – with a discount offer, buyers know that it’s there for a limited time. The perception is that your product is really worth the pre-discount price and will return to it at the end of the offer.
Even though Amazon may not rank your new product highly, you can still get more prominence using coupons. Using Amazon coupons you get on the coupon page, and you also get a coupon badge that appears on the search results – attracting attention even if you’re a little way down the list. And if you use Vipon for your discount offer, you have access to a couple of million hard-core coupon users who will see only discounted products, and not all the competing products that sell for full price.
Sometimes you have a product that sold well, and it’s plateaued. Sales might even have started to dip. So in this case, your product needs a bit of a jump start – and a discount campaign could give it that little shot in the arm it needs. By pushing up your sales volumes, you’re giving Amazon’s algorithm a little nudge in your favor, and hopefully, that will send you to the top of the search listings again.
You can also use discount offers for products you want to discontinue, perhaps because you’re bringing in an improved version shortly. Because Amazon charges you for keeping inventory and also charges you for retiring inventory, it can actually work out better for you to sell at a slight loss than paying the fees if you have a small amount of product left to sell!
Amazon charges also mean if you have too much inventory heading into Q4 when extra inventory charges apply, it’s worth using discount offers tactically to lighten up your inventory a little, while keeping your sales ranking.
Is there ever a bad time for a discount offer? Probably not – but if you concentrate on the right times and the right products to discount, you can keep your prices and your margins high on your other products instead of leaving money on the table.
