Prime Day 2016 was one of the most successful events in Amazon’s 22 year history. Their self-created annual shopping holiday led to a 60% increase in orders over the previous year’s event and brought in an estimated $525 million–the most revenue they’ve ever brought in on one day.
As your Cyber Monday preparations loom overhead there’s invaluable lessons to be learned from Amazon Prime Day. Lessons that will help you snag your piece of the $3+ billion Cyber Monday pie.
2015 was a record breaking year for online sales during Cyber Monday, up 16% since last year. And although technology and electronics like Samsung TV’s, Apple Watches, and Dre Beats headphones were among the top items purchased, other industries experienced growth as well.
In fact, soft goods, such as shoes and clothes were among some of the most popular categories for online shoppers. So regardless of your industry, it’s time to start prepping. And what better way than by looking to Amazon or examples of what to do?
The following list contains 3 lessons you can learn from Amazon Prime Day that will help get ready to take on this year’s Cyber Monday. .
Look Beyond The Deals
Amazon Prime Day brought profound increases in eCommerce traffic to the web. The fabricated shopping holiday helped other online retailers see as much as 3x more traffic than usual on that particular day. As shoppers were frantically browsing for the best deals, they were inadvertently coming across curated collections of items, similar products, and entirely new products that they weren’t initially seeking out.
In other words, it increased traffic to regular priced items as well––so don’t ignore the rest of your store.
This increase in exposure to all of your products, not just your sale items, will no doubt occur on Cyber Monday, so you need to get your eCommerce store properly set up for it. Here’s how to get started:
Refine your site search. As shoppers come to your site in search of your best Cyber Monday deals, ensure your site search displays relevant results, suggests similar products, uses guided search, allows filtering, auto completes, is simply designed, and easy to use.
Update your product pages. When a shopper lands on your product pages you have to capitalize on that opportunity to sell them on it. Update and optimize your product photography, product descriptions, customer reviews, video and UGC. It could also be helpful to display shipping rates and times on the product page so shoppers don’t have to flip from page to page, keeping them focused on adding products to their cart.
Optimize your shopping cart. Once a shopper adds a product into their basket, learn from Amazon and suggest similar products that they might also like, maintain a minimalist design that limits distractions, and focus on site speed.
Mobile: The New Breadwinner
On Prime Day 2016, 12 million shoppers used the Prime App to browse products. That’s 35% more than on a regular day and 4 million additional shoppers that used their phones to shop.
And they weren’t just browsing. Amazon reported that shoppers made 100% more purchases from mobile devices this year than last year.
We’ve written about it before, Mobile is taking over and it’s here to stay, but it’s important for your store to embody this as the biggest online shopping day of the year draws near. Learn from the massive mobile growth that Amazon experienced and better prepare your mobile store for Cyber Monday with these tips:
Mobile-optimized forms. To get prepped for a surge in mobile purchases make sure your forms are ready for mobile shoppers. Limit form fields and utilize pre-filled forms by recognizing returning customers. Auto-advance a shopper from one form to the next to reduce effort. And make sure to use the correct form input type, like numerical keyboard for numbers, or a calendar if it’s a date field.
Guest checkouts. You may experience new visitors checking out your online store on Cyber Monday. When they get to the checkout make sure that they don’t have to endure a lengthy account signup process and allow them to checkout as a guest.
Sticky CTA’s. As a user scrolls through deals on your product pages, make the “buy now” and “add to cart” buttons sticky at the top of the screen. This enables them to make quick and easy purchases.
Performance is Everything
Imagine this, you get up at an ungodly hour, eager to score the best lightning deals of Prime Day. You find the TV of your dreams for 40% off, you frantically try and get it into your shopping cart while it’s still in stock, and your faced with an error message. This is what’s know as a #Fail.
Unfortunately that’s what happened for some Prime Day shoppers when Amazon was having technical difficulties during the sales first few hours. One major lesson to learn from this is to make sure you have a scalable, high-performing web eCommerce infrastructure in place.
It’s imperative that your store is equipped to handle the influx in traffic that it’s going to receive on Cyber Monday. Proper server and hosting configuration, robust and scalable CMS and eCommerce systems, and a strong support and maintenance team you can rely on should be put in place now.
Conclusion
Cyber Monday is coming. November 28 to be exact. Which means, if you hadn’t already guessed, it’s time to get prepping.
And by learning from Amazon Prime Day’s successes and mistakes, you’ll be ready to take on the biggest online shopping sale of the year.
How are you preparing for Cyber Monday this year? Let me know in the comments.
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