Amazon Holiday Prep Series: Using Technology to Optimize Key Business Areas

The Amazon holiday prep series will run throughout Q4, as well as the weeks leading up to and following the peak selling season. It will focus on relevant e-commerce holiday news, as well as actionable strategies you can implement to achieve your sales goals and carry momentum into the new year.

With the busiest selling season of the year rapidly approaching — and digital channels on pace to beat out in-store holiday shopping — the time is now to ensure your supply chain is in shape to withstand the increase in demand, optimize your product detail pages to drive engagement, and leverage data to help you make decisions about your Q4 sales forecasts. 

A firm understanding of your timeline — such as sending inventory to FBA by Amazon’s to-be-announced deadline — and budget will be immensely helpful so you can anticipate what you can spend on advertising and promotions for key shopping days such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday or determining how much to allocate toward existing items in your catalog versus new or holiday-specific products.

In this article, we will discuss three critical applications that illustrate the importance of managing your catalog with AI-driven technology year-round, but particularly during periods of high search traffic and sales volume such as Q4.

2. Inventory Planning and Returns Management

Having an in-depth understanding of your Amazon business’s inventory position is of utmost importance from October through December, as slow-moving or non-selling items can easily compromise your profits. With Amazon FBA, storage costs can add up substantially if the inventory is stagnant for too long.

The company may also deny certain items that do not hit specific demand thresholds, as its fulfillment centers are inundated with an influx of Q4-specific inventory and looks to only stock products that are guaranteed to move.

In order to avoid facing IPI storage access limits and inventory storage overage fees, you need a 360-degree view of what items to restock, the appropriate times to do so to avoid stocking out  — which can hurt your performance metrics — when to discontinue an item or dispose of stale inventory, and when you are noncompetitive on an item.

By leveraging a technology platform that allows you to receive both comprehensive and granular snapshots of your business, you can easily extract the insights you need at a given time and transform the information into action to fuel business growth.

Additionally, given that more than one million returns were processed by UPS on Jan. 3, 2019, you need to take an active approach to returns management before it is too late. In order to maximize the growth opportunities this holiday season, you need to know which variables of your business impact your profitability and to what extent. These can include elements such as storage and fulfillment fees, shipping costs, cost of goods sold (COGS), operating costs, advertising spend, costs associated with processing returns, and more. 

With nearly $25 million worth of items returned on Amazon every year, be sure to track the reason for each return in order to effectively understand the root cause of each one and simultaneously drive down your return rate. You can use tools to set alerts for different reasons or create reports to see the volume of your returns. Feedvisor’s returns dashboard allows you to slice-and-dice your returns data by volume, value, SKU, vendor, and brand to show how returns impact your profitability and overall operation.