The 2026 selling season is about to look very different. We’re at peak adoption of consumers using LLMs, like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity, to shop. Because of this, the consumer journey and path to conversion are now more complex. The trust consumers place in LLM responses to their shopping prompts is surprisingly high, with most shoppers relying entirely on the AI to shape the decision all the way to purchase. 

95% of shoppers who get a product recommendation from an LLM won’t visit a brand or retailer website to verify it. Among 18–27 year olds, 64% buy on the recommendation alone.

Twelve months ago, most brands were still focused on ranking in traditional search results. Consumer shopping behavior has changed more in the last 12 months than in the previous five years combined. That shift is going to define how every peak event plays out in 2026. 

Amazon and Walmart are blocking LLMs from crawling their product data. So, keeping consumers within the Amazon ecosystem to maximize Prime Day returns and overall conversions is critical. 52% of all U.S. consumers still begin their online product searches directly on Amazon,^¹ which is reassuring for Prime Day activity. But when we factor in the LLM component, our strategy to maximize Prime returns gets more nuanced. 

Previously, we wouldn’t have as heavily considered our clients’ .com websites as part of the Prime Day journey, but if LLM recommendations are relying on Google and other general product data feeds, then ensuring product data hygiene from those outside sources is critical. 

How should brands reach shoppers on Amazon and LLMs at the same time?

• For consumers already starting their journey in Amazon search, keep them engaged, targeted with appropriate content and ads, and slam dunk the conversion. 
• For consumers starting their search in LLMs, make sure client .com product data feeds are accurate, updated, and organized so the right recommendations entice consumers to seek out the shopping moment outside the LLM. 

There’s more to this year’s approach. Prime Day lands June 23–26 this year, the earliest window since 2021 and the second year at four full days.¹

Back-to-school demand is already overlapping with it. BFCM is less than six months out. And the LLMs shoppers are using to find and compare products have improved significantly since last peak season.

LLMs are pulling richer product details, making more accurate comparisons, and starting to support transactions directly. The brands and retailers who will perform best during peak 2026 are the ones whose catalogs are accurate, structured, and available everywhere the AI is looking. 

At Rithum, we work across 900+ channels with brands and retailers preparing for these events right now. We’re deep in the planning alongside them, from media strategy to product data to channel prioritization, and everything below reflects what we’re seeing and recommending heading into peak selling in 2026. 

What are the major 2026 peak sales events, and when do they happen? 

• Amazon Prime Day: June 23–26¹ 
• Back-to-school: May through September (peaks during and after Prime Day) 
• Labor Day: September 1 
• Amazon Prime Big Deal Days: October (dates TBD; October 7–8 in 2025) 
• Singles’ Day: November 11 
• Black Friday: November 27 
• Cyber Monday: November 30 

Beyond the timeline, two things connect every event on this list: AI is reshaping how shoppers discover products, and the brands with accurate, structured data across channels will capture more demand than those without it. 

How should brands prepare for Amazon Prime Day in June 2026? 

Prime Day runs June 23–26 across 35 categories, with deals dropping three times daily and new inventory going live every five minutes during peak hours.¹ Amazon is putting particular emphasis on fresh groceries and household essentials, building on 4 billion grocery and essentials items delivered via same-day delivery over the past year.² 

Last year’s Prime Day (July 8–11) generated $24.1 billion in U.S. online spend, up 30.3% year over year.³ Four of the top five items sold were household or grocery products.⁴ School supplies rose 175% and dorm essentials 84%.³

Across our own client base, the four-day format shifted buying patterns. Shoppers browsed Days 1 and 2, then converted late, with Day 4 GMV jumping 38% year over year. 

One Rithum client pivoted mid-event to back-to-school bundles and optimized product titles on Day 2. That shift drove a 15% sales lift over the prior year. The teams that adjusted in real time outperformed the ones that set a plan and left it. And that was before AI was deeply embedded in the Prime Day experience. 

What role does Alexa AI play in Prime Day 2026? 

This year, Alexa for Shopping (formerly Rufus) will sit directly in the Amazon search bar, search results, and product detail pages for every U.S. customer.¹ Amazon has told sellers that Alexa pulls from listing content to answer shopper questions and make recommendations. If your product attributes are incomplete, Alexa will recommend someone else’s.

During Prime Day 2025, shoppers who engaged Rufus were 60% more likely to complete a purchase. Alexa now helps shoppers build personalized deal guides, set price alerts, trigger auto-buy at target prices, and review 365-day price history. Every one of those features pulls from your product data. If your titles, descriptions, and images aren’t accurate, you’re not showing up in those conversations. 

Rithum’s retail media advertising connects spend to product performance across Amazon, Walmart, and Target so you can shift budgets while the event is live. Marketplace listings keep data accurate across 900+ channels so you can coordinate pricing, inventory, and promotions across Amazon and every channel competing for the same shopper during Prime Day. And inventory management prevents oversells and stockouts during the exact hours demand spikes. 

How does AI shopping change peak season strategy in 2026? 

When AI gets product information wrong, 58% of shoppers lose trust in the brand itself, not the AI tool that served it. And shoppers aren’t loyal to a single AI platform either: ChatGPT’s daily active user share has fallen steadily since early 2025, Gemini has more than doubled its share in the same period, and 20% of AI users now regularly use two or more chatbot apps. Brands that only optimize for one platform are leaving reach on the table. 

The shopping capabilities on these platforms have also matured. Perplexity offers one-click checkout through Buy with Pro and PayPal integration across thousands of merchants. Gemini supports agentic checkout through Google Pay, including auto-buy when a price target is met.

ChatGPT launched native shopping features in late 2025. These are live commerce channels, and every one of them relies on structured product data to generate accurate recommendations. 

We built ChatGPT and Perplexity Feeds for this: product data compiled, optimized for LLMs, and delivered for ingestion so your brand controls how it appears in AI recommendations. Our upcoming GEO (generative engine optimization) pilot provides a way to track how products appear, move, and compare within AI-driven results. Rithum and Stripe are also building the commerce infrastructure for transactions that happen inside the AI conversation itself. 

The path from catalog accuracy to LLM delivery to in-conversation purchase is what determines whether your products get recommended during peak season. Every step depends on the one before it, and most brands are still missing at least one. 

How early does back-to-school shopping start in 2026, and what should sellers prioritize? 

Back-to-school retail is projected at $85.42 billion in 2026, up 3.3% year over year.⁵ 67% of families started buying by early July 2025, up from 55% the year before. With Prime Day now in June and school supplies already among its top-performing categories (up 175% during Prime Day 2025³), back-to-school effectively starts during Prime Day. 

84% of parents say prices are too high. 82% are prioritizing value over brand. But 80% still say buying the specific products their child wants is important.⁵ Parents are cutting back on clothing and switching to store brands in some categories while spending full price in others. Brands that understand which of their products fall into which bucket can plan promotions accordingly. 

We recommend spreading promotions across May through September rather than concentrating spend in a single burst. Rithum’s product catalog feeds push near-real-time updates to price, stock, and product data across every channel where shoppers and AI agents are looking. For brands selling across multiple regions, automatic localization for language, currency, and regional specs keeps listings accurate without rebuilding feeds from scratch. 

What should brands plan for across Q4 2026 peak events? 

September through November packs five major sales events into 90 days, and performance in each one can help shape the strategy for the next. 

Labor Day (September 1) — The last major sales moment before Q4 takes over.

Brands use it to move seasonal stock in a smart way. They set pricing rules based on demand signals, not flat markdowns. This helps them carry less dead stock into the holiday rush.

Rithum automates promotional updates across marketplaces. Order management routes to the best fulfillment location based on your rules. 

Prime Big Deal Days (October) — Amazon’s separate October event, distinct from summer Prime Day.

The 2025 event (October 7–8) outperformed the prior year globally.³ Shoppers complete holiday purchases here, and the performance data directly informs Q4 decisions. Brands that connected product feeds to LLM platforms earlier in the year will have compounding advantages by October.

Singles’ Day (November 11) — $202 billion across major Chinese platforms in 2024, making it the largest single shopping event globally.³

The event continues to expand into Southeast Asia, where Chinese ecommerce players now account for up to 50% of B2C GMV in key markets. U.S. and European retailers saw an 11% year-over-year lift in influenced revenue last November. Rithum supports 600+ global marketplaces with built-in localization and dedicated account strategists across EU, US, and APAC. 

How should brands prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2026? 

Black Friday (November 27) and Cyber Monday (November 30) — BFCM 2024 delivered $10.8 billion (Black Friday) and a record $14.3 billion (Cyber Monday 2025).³

Promotions started climbing November 16 last year, nearly two weeks early. Mobile drove 56% of online holiday spend last season.³ AI-assisted shopping volume, which surged during Prime Day 2025, will be even higher by November as more consumers adopt LLM-based product discovery. 

During BFCM 2025, we advised clients to spread budgets from October through December. Clients increased spending by only 3% on average and still hit efficiency goals with a 1.7 advertising cost of sales. Here’s how those Prime Day lessons apply to holiday planning. 

Across all of these events, the operational requirements are the same: accurate product data everywhere you sell, budgets that can move in real time, and listings that don’t break under pressure. Rithum’s product catalog feeds deliver data to every channel and AI platform in the right format. Paid search and shopping ads optimize across Google, Microsoft, and Meta with feed-level precision. And marketplace listings catches broken or non-compliant listings before they cost you revenue during the highest-traffic weeks of the year. 

How do you prepare for peak season across 900+ channels at once? 

Our 2026 Commerce Readiness Index found that 43% of retailers and 37% of brands are prioritizing AI enablement across operations. The best teams have one thing in common at their busiest times. Product data, ad spend, inventory, and fulfillment all run in a single connected system. When something changes mid-event, they can act right away. 

Rithum brings all of that into one platform across 900+ channels and AI platforms. If you’re planning for peak 2026 and want to talk through your approach, our team is here. 

Footnotes
¹ Amazon Press Release, “Mark Your Calendars: Amazon Announces Prime Day Event from June 23–26,” June 2026. press.aboutamazon.com
² Forbes, “Amazon Prime Day 2026 Moves to June—This Time With Alexa AI Powering the Cart,” June 2026. forbes.com
³ Adobe Analytics, various reports including “Prime Day Event Drove $24 Billion in Online Spend Across U.S. Retailers” (July 2025), Black Friday 2024, Cyber Monday 2025, holiday season 2025, and Singles’ Day data. business.adobe.com
⁴ Numerator, “Amazon Prime Day 2025 First Half Results,” July 2025
⁵ MRI-Simmons, “Back-to-School Shopping Trends of the 2026 Season,” May 2026. mrisimmons.com | Accio, “Back-to-School Trends 2026.” accio.com

The post How to prepare for peak season 2026: Prime Day to BFCM appeared first on Rithum.

Most retail media teams already know what they can change. The more difficult decision to make is when, especially once a program spans multiple retailers and a large product catalog. Executing a plan slows down during the time between noticing a change and getting the right fix applied across the account. While it might be easy enough to spot a change, it is harder to update multiple SKUs across several campaigns without taking on a day’s worth of manual work. 

In campaign management, I push for a simple operating rule: treat retail media optimization like a routine you can run even when the week is busy. That routine does two things well: It helps you spot movement early, and it makes it easier to apply updates across many campaigns without turning the work into a click marathon. Here’s how to make this routine work. 

Start by looking at what changes week by week

Instead of looking at a snapshot summary of what happened, compare so you can see what changed. Start every review by comparing performance to a prior period that makes sense for your business. For example, for daily work, compare to yesterday. For weekly work, compare to last week. For monthly work, compare to last month. Also pull the same time period from last year when seasonality matters. Year-over-year context helps you separate a real performance shift from a predictable calendar pattern, especially around holidays, promotions, and category cycles. 

Once you look at change over time, you can sort what you see into the three buckets that matter: 

1. A product or retail condition changed. That might be availability, pricing, Buy Box status, or competition changes (their promotion strategies could have changed). 
2. Campaign settings or targeting changed. Pacing, targeting mix, bids, or placement performance shifted. 
3. The reporting view changed. Retailers do not all report the same way, and attribution can differ by ad type and placement. 

That sorting step keeps you from doing bid work to solve a product issue, and it keeps you from blaming the retailer when the campaign setup is the real problem. 

One practical note: not every retailer provides the same fields. Use what you have on each network and treat additional commerce context as a bonus signal when it is available. 

Daily retail media optimization review: keep budget pointed at what can convert

A daily review is meant to look at where you can prevent obvious waste and protect coverage. This is different from a review where you’re looking to optimize the whole account.  

It helps to look at delivery and pacing. If a campaign is not serving or a budget is pacing wrong, nothing else matters until that is corrected. 

Next, it’s important to look at concentration. Spend almost always clusters. If the top set of SKUs is shifting, the day’s performance shifts with it. 

After doing that, check whether the SKUs you’re paying to promote still have a fair shot to compete today. Look for changes that can undermine conversion even if your campaign settings did not move, such as pricing shifts, inventory pressure, slower fulfillment, weaker product page content, or a change in the competitive set, like a new promotion, a competitor price drop, or more aggressive bidding in the category. 

Were there sharp swings on the same set of top spenders? Look at whether there was a big move in CPC, conversion rate, or sales. This can help you confirm inputs, then decide whether to act. 

Daily actions should stay simple. Pause what cannot convert and redirect spend to the next-best set. Reduce exposure when you need to buy time. Save deeper structure work for the weekly pass. 

Weekly retail media optimization review: fix patterns and cut back on manual work

With daily reviews, you can catch exceptions. Weekly reviews allow you to improve how the account runs. If you see the same problem across a set of campaigns or SKUs, apply one change across the set of SKUs and move on. 

The weekly review also gives you a cleaner window for decisions that need more than a single day of signal: 

• Tighten targeting based on what repeated, not what spiked once. 
• Adjust bids and budgets where performance held steady long enough to trust it. 
• Decide which SKUs earn more investment and which ones need constraints. 

Weekly is also where testing belongs so you can learn and not create chaotic changes. Pick one change you can explain, write down what you changed and why, then review it the next week before you add another variable. 

Monthly retail media optimization review: reset budgets, structure, and measurement 

Monthly work should feel different from weekly work. Weekly work improves performance inside the current plan. Monthly work checks whether the plan still matches the business. 

This is where you make the decisions that reduce rework later: Rebalance budget by retailer, category, and the product sets the business actually wants to grow. Then clean up structure that slows execution or muddies reporting. Once you’ve done that, you can confirm the measurement view answers the question your stakeholders care about.  

Where Rithum fits in the day-to-day work 

A review routine only helps when it leads to fast, consistent changes. Most delays are a result of repeat work that gets handled one campaign at a time. 

That is the gap our digital marketing, retail media managed services, and tooling are designed to close. We use rules-based automation and filters to improve bidding, keyword, and dayparting strategies, and we automate key campaign components like bidding, dayparting, and ad status.  

On the operations side, we also take on the work that tends to clog a week: campaign creation, tracking, and reporting across multiple channels. 

The benefit is speed and consistency, especially when the same change needs to roll across a large catalog. 

If you want a quick way to assess whether your current approach will scale, look at one week of account work and count how often you made the same change in more than one place. When repetition is high, the best process in the world still slows down without a better execution path. 

A better way to value support 

If you are considering a platform, managed support, or both, do not start with feature checklists. Start with a workflow question: 

When performance shifts midweek, how quickly can your team apply the fix across the full catalog, across retailers, without creating a second job in spreadsheets? 

If you want to pressure-test your current process, our team can walk through the cadence above using a recent slice of your program and identify where repeat work is slowing you down. The retail media services overview is the right place to start if you want a team to help run execution day to day. 

Nick Szeto is Senior Manager, Advertising Account Management, at Rithum.

The post You already monitor retail media and digital marketing campaigns; build a routine that gets updates live faster appeared first on Rithum.

Many brands face the same issue as they grow their online business: campaign costs climb, but performance doesn’t rise enough to offset it. They’re left in limbo: more budget alone won’t solve the problem, but pulling back from digital channels isn’t the answer either.  

For Draper Tools and Moen, that challenge led them to Rithum. With Rithum handling the heavy lifting behind the scenes, both brands turned inefficient ad spend into stronger returns without stretching their teams. Here’s a closer look at how they optimized their digital marketing strategies with Rithum—and the results that followed. 

Draper Tools increases orders by 470% with 50% lower ACOS 

Draper Tools, a century-old U.K.-based supplier of hand and power tools, was investing heavily in online sales channels, but wasn’t seeing the results to justify the spend. Despite their reputation, Draper Tools found that the cost of acquiring customers was uncomfortably high. For their small team, manually managing bids and attempting to rebalance spend across a large number of SKUs grew time-consuming and increasingly ineffective. 

Draper Tools turned to Rithum to maximize their marketing investments. Rithum streamlined testing, monitoring, and ad spend rebalancing, resulting in a dramatic transformation of Draper Tools’ online business: advertising cost of sales (ACOS) dropped by 50%, and total orders surged by 470%. 

With better data and reporting from Rithum, Draper Tools spends less time on daily execution and more on long-term strategy, empowering them to make more informed decisions about where and when to invest their marketing dollars. 

Read the full case study. 

Moen grows retail media revenue by 194% with full-funnel campaigns 

Moen, a leading kitchen and bath fixtures brand, struggled to optimize its products’ presence on Amazon. Too often, shoppers were served competitors’ products—a consequence of Moen’s up-and-down keyword performance and a lack of reach through non-branded avenues. 

Moen partnered with Rithum to revamp its Amazon advertising strategy. Rithum bridged the gap between marketing teams at Moen and Amazon, allowing Moen to better leverage Amazon’s platform. The result was a full-funnel strategy that included sponsored video campaigns, bid timing adjustments, and expanded targeting to reach new audiences earlier in the buying journey (a departure from Moen’s traditional branded campaigns). 

The shift paid off. Within a year, Moen achieved a 194.5% increase in retail media revenue for its promoted products. Moen’s improved performance not only allows it to reach more shoppers but also increases ROI from its investment in Amazon. 

Read the full case study. 

Smarter spend, stronger results with Rithum 

Both Draper Tools and Moen faced a common challenge: spending more on ads without getting more in return. But by leveraging Rithum’s platform to optimize their digital marketing strategies, both companies unlocked meaningful, measurable gains. 
 
Rithum’s marketing solutions can help your business optimize campaign performance and maximize marketing investments.

The post How Moen and Draper Tools turned underperforming ads into measurable results  appeared first on Rithum.

In our latest webinar, Link Walls, vice president of digital marketing strategy for Rithum, explores the retail media landscape and what you can do to spur growth this holiday season.  

Retail Media Has Grown (Again)

Digital advertising has changed yet again. Whereas Google and Meta previously owned the space, Amazon’s digital advertising revenue increase of 22% to $10.7 billion in Q2 2023 demonstrates a shift to a triopoly leading the retail media pack. In fact, most analysts believe Amazon’s ads now drive the majority of its profits. 

We believe there are a few reasons retail media has taken off at such an accelerated rate:

1. Privacy changes have made tracking success more difficult. 

It’s been about two years since Apple introduced pop-ups restricting activity tracking across other apps without users’ permission. While this is good for privacy, it makes it harder for brands and other apps to track their success across other channels. Google has also announced plans to do away with third-party cookies by 2024, straining tracking even more.

2. Closed loop measurement drives increased investment. 

When companies like Apple and Google make it harder to track consumer activity, investment in those avenues naturally decreases. Conversely, closed loop measurement like Amazon Ads makes it easy to see how paid ads lead directly to clicks and consumer purchases.  

3. Retail sites have become search engines. 

While Google is still a major player in e-commerce search, it’s not the only path shoppers have to take to look for products. Following in Amazon’s footsteps, many retail sites have become search engines themselves, allowing consumers to do more than simply place orders. They can explore and discover new products at the same time.

What’s New for Holiday 2023?

Planning well for the coming shopping season requires taking advantage of all your available resources. This year, multiple marketplaces boast new selling tools to help you break through the noise and boost brand awareness. 

• Off-Amazon Sponsored Products. Amazon Sponsored Products are typically best for the lower end of the funnel. But extending these ads outside of Amazon to premium sites like Pinterest or Buzzfeed allows Sponsored Products to function more as a discovery tool. 
• More Prime Days. Amazon will host its second “Prime Big Deal Days” this October. Though little is known about the event, it will take place on October 10 and 11 and is expected to be just as big (if not bigger) than July’s Prime Day event just a couple months ago. 
• Sponsored Videos on Walmart Connect. Sponsored Videos are now available for all registered brands on Walmart Connect. This highly engaging format appears below the first few search results (for both desktop and mobile) and is perfect for brand storytelling, product discovery and increasing sales.  
• eBay Promoted Listings Advanced. eBay Promoted Listings Advanced has been around for a couple of years, but only in beta testing. Now, it’s generally available, adding three premium placement opportunities for a total of seven on search result pages. According to eBay, sellers see 50% more sales, on average, when using Promoted Listings Advanced compared to non-promoted items. Want to stick with the standard offering? Your listings are still seen up to three times more, on average, when using Promoted Listings Standard compared to non-promoted items. 
• eBay Offsite Ads (beta). Like Amazon, eBay is experimenting with off-site ads, though the solution is still in beta. Now, you can increase your reach on external channels like Google Shopping, paying only when a buyer clicks your ad. 

Be ready for the most important holidays through 2023. Get our e-commerce calendar for the second half of the year so you don’t miss a thing. 

Your Holiday Prep Should Be Well Underway

As the holiday hustle approaches, tapping into retail media and new ad options could put your brand front and center. If your holiday e-commerce strategy isn’t already in the works, it’s time to kick it into gear. 

We recommend a three-pronged approach that starts with building a strong advertising foundation. Identify your priority assortment for the peak season and fine-tune your digital storefront with multiple inviting product pages. Then, assess the health of your product content and consider Amazon A+ Content for increased conversions. 

A full-funnel strategy will also help you keep shoppers focused on your brand no matter where they are in the shopping journey. Product detail page targeting showcases your own ASINs to eliminate competitor real estate. Or, try new Sponsored Brand Video to show off your branded content to newcomers with a welcoming vibe.

Finally, create an agile system that connects your product data to ads. An integrated solution that takes into account the product lifecycle and a focus on both profit and growth can help you maximize conversions and reduce wasted ad dollars. 

Not sure how to implement or improve your 2023 holiday strategy? Start by watching the full webinar, Build a Breakthrough Retail Media Strategy for the Holidays, for more detailed explanations and tips. Or, contact our Managed Services team for help from an e-commerce expert. 

The post Your Holiday Retail Media Strategy appeared first on Rithum.

The holiday season is coming quickly, and inadequate planning — or misplaced priorities — will cost sales.

However, don’t launch into seasonal planning mode without addressing the three most common challenges brands and retailers face in the run up to busy holiday season:

• Pricing and profitability
• Marketing and advertising
• Inventory management

Taking concentrated actions in these three areas now will yield results in the final weeks of the year. And we’re providing our recommendations, based on our decades of innovation in e-commerce, to help you get started. 

Pricing and Profitability

Preparing to meet the expectations of increasingly savvy and selective consumers is no small feat, especially this year when price sensitivity is likely to be high. Shoppers now regularly expect free shipping… and free returns. They want to feel as though they are getting a bargain, but also that they are purchasing a high quality product. Unsatisfied or frustrated consumers who return products and/or leave poor reviews can generate a ripple effect on profitability.  

Rising return rates coupled with cautious consumer spending habits have begun chipping away at gains in all corners of e-commerce. Marketplace sellers especially are feeling the pinch. 

How can you reduce returns and protect profit margins? Simply slashing prices may not drive up sales to desired levels and will affect profitability. Developing keen pricing strategies based on intelligent data points can provide necessary balance in meeting pricing and profitability goals.

First, we recommend ensuring all your product detail pages have as much information as possible, including: 

• Dimensions
• Color description
• Source materials 
• Typical and suggested uses for the product
• Clear images that present the product from all angles

Optimized content that consistently appears across all your selling channels builds confidence in your product before purchase and reduces the chances it’ll be sent back. In addition, setting up dynamic pricing strategies can maximize your profit margins while keeping you in compliance with any pricing agreements you have in place.

If you’re looking to drive growth through new channels, product or markets this holiday season striking the right balance in pricing and profitability is critical to success. How can you set a healthy pricing momentum when planning expansions? To preserve your efforts to maintain stable profit margins, we recommend that you:

• Identify and focus on marketplaces with lower return rates
• Consider a hybrid selling approach that includes both first party and third party
• Look at costs associated with each selling model, such as listing, returns, logisitics and storage fees — these can add up quickly and affect profitability 

Marketing and Advertising

Consumers are inundated with ads and promotions in the lead up to the holidays. Although advertising is essential at this time of year, it’s incredibly difficult to stand out from the crowd based on traditional tactics alone. 

The key lies in finding ready-to-buy shoppers who are already searching for and interested in your products. A centralized approach to digital marketing can yield cross-channel insights into finding those consumers through paid search and shopping. And retail media, when strategically implemented, can yield tremendous benefits in meeting ROAS goals and boosting visibility and sales. 

How can you efficiently use retail media to your greatest advantage? We recommend focusing on five elements in your campaigns: 

• Optimizing content
• Smart audience targeting
• Segmenting your catalogue
• Automating your campaign
• Testing (and more testing!)

We’ve found the most successful retail media endeavors harvest keywords to strengthen search results, employ brand protection tactics, acquire new customers and, ultimately, conquer the competition. And managing retail media campaigns from one centralized platform that is monitoring marketplace listings, inventory levels and other digital marketing campaigns can amplify efficiency (for example, you avoid wasting ad spend on products that have gone out of stock).  

Inventory Management

New challenges are appearing for brands and retailers in inventory management. Storage costs keep rising, ongoing economic uncertainties and inflation-related pressures on consumers’ wallets have led to inventory challenges for many sellers. 

Tackling the first two challenges (pricing/profitability and marketing/advertising) head-on can provide some relief in the struggle to move products. In addition, we recommend developing: 

• Techniques to avoid excess inventory (we have suggestions for brands and retailers)
• Strong product selection strategies that, among other goals, ensure poorly performing products are removed
• Automation and procedures that focus on synchronizing and maintaining inventory levels across channels
• Action plans to execute when excess inventory thresholds are crossed

If you’re looking for professional support to sharpen your strategies before the busy festive season arrives, the experts at Rithum would love to help! Our Managed Services team works with brands and retailers to plan for seasonal variations and challenges, expand into new channels, streamline operations and provide advice and guidance on ensuring profitability. Contact us to learn more. 

The post Navigate the Holiday Season with Confidence: Expert Tips to Drive Sales and Avoid Pitfalls appeared first on Rithum.

It may seem like the time to slow down, but some of the biggest holidays and events are still to come this year — including Cyber Five.

But there’s no need to plan in the dark. We’ve done the work for you in our biannual e-commerce calendar featuring important dates for the second half of 2023. From North American holidays and industry events to tips and must-know statistics, this calendar is jam-packed with everything you need to know from now until the end of the year. 

What’s Coming in Q3 and Q4 2023

What are you planning for World Teacher’s Day? How early are you starting your Black Friday preparations? The Rithum calendar features a variety of upcoming holidays you can build promotions around — but there’s more, too. The calendar features tips, reminders and helpful hints in categories including:

• Events/holidays
• Digital marketing
• E-commerce success stories
• Marketplaces
• Strategy
• Holiday prep
• Retail media

Plus, the calendar features beautiful imagery that coincides with each month’s holidays and climate. You may just want to print it out and pin it up for easy viewing! 

Download a free copy of The 2023 Essential E-Commerce Calendar: January-June now for tips and dates to help you stay organized throughout the second half of the year.

The post E-Commerce Calendar 2023: Essential Dates for July-December appeared first on Rithum.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

Retail Media continues driving conversions 

Insights showed the significant impact of retail media on conversions throughout the entire buying journey. With research showing that product searches often start on retail sites such as Amazon rather than search engines, retail media allows advertisers to not only reach shoppers even closer to their purchase but to also help drive brand awareness earlier on in their journey. Using precise targeting and contextual relevance, a strong retail media strategy can help to engage customers at every stage of the purchase funnel, helping to create measurable impact. 

Measure, measure, measure

The speakers discussed the factors causing the rapid growth in retail media and one of the key drivers identified was the focus on measurable ROI for marketing budgets. Retail media fits the bill perfectly. With GDPR regulations and tightening rules around user tracking and 3rd party cookie usage, understanding how well ad campaigns are performing is becoming harder. First-party data is quickly becoming the new gold. And retailers are sitting on a huge pot of it. 

Brands were encouraged to pay attention to Closed Loop Measurement (CLM) as part of a winning strategy. Establishing direct links between marketing activities and in-store or online sales enables brands to gain deeper insights into the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns and consumer purchase behavior, in turn supporting strong ROI whilst also helping to drive increased investment.

AI is transforming the retail media landscape

AI-powered solutions are reshaping how brands and retailers approach advertising and creating more opportunities to connect with consumers throughout their journey. AI has allowed brands and retailers to enhance their customer targeting, creating detailed customer profiles and helping to deliver more personalized experiences. And the capabilities don’t end there. AI is also helping to optimize the way retailers interact with brands, allowing them to own and tailor the purchase funnel for each consumer. By harnessing the power of AI, brands and retailers can optimize their display ad campaigns on retail media platforms enabling better targeting, enhanced ROI and ROAS, and more efficient allocation of advertising spend. 

Selecting the right Retail Media Networks is crucial

Amazon led the way in monetizing advertising opportunities for sellers on their sites and it’s no surprise that retailers are now seeing the huge potential in creating their own offerings, capitalizing on lucrative ad revenue, and allowing sellers to benefit from their valuable first-party data.  As the retail media options increase, brands need to carefully consider where to focus ad spend.  At the summit, the experts advised brands to first look at offerings from retailers they already have relationships with to assess the advertising options that will maximize return on ad spend and ultimately profitability.  

Beyond these existing relationships, brands need to select retail media networks that align closely with their audience, offering them reach and engagement with new customers.

Automation will help you scale faster

Automated processes play a pivotal role in most successful ad strategies. With potentially thousands of products in inventory and many moving parts when managing ads, staying on top of multiple campaigns and ensuring ad spend is going to the right products can be challenging and time-consuming. Automated ad management can help brands to minimize manual tasks, make data-driven decisions, and quickly adapt to campaigns and ad spend to changing market conditions and inventory levels. By using a centralized e-commerce platform to manage both inventory and advertising, brands and retailers can harness data to make informed and guided advertising decisions, and improve business performance. 

Let’s not forget about product content!

Let’s face it, competition is fierce out there and setting yourself apart amongst thousands of other listings can be challenging. Clicking on a sponsored ad is just the first part of the journey, seeing those clicks turn into conversions is another matter. Link Walls, VP of Digital Marketing Strategy, discussed the importance of regularly reviewing product content and optimizing details as part of a winning retail media strategy. Well-crafted and informative product descriptions, high-quality images, and accurate specifications not only help customers make informed purchasing decisions but also contribute to a positive user experience allowing you to stand out in a crowded market and ensure you’re getting the most out of your ad spend. 

Rithum can help automate your retail media campaign, provide management and tracking support and deliver sales growth and a higher return on your ad spend. Click here to find out more about the retail media services we offer. Looking to understand more about creating a successful retail media strategy? Download our free eBook here.

The post Unveiling the Insights: Key Takeaways from the Rithum Retail Media Summit appeared first on Rithum.

While the exact date hasn’t been announced, we expect Prime Day to take place in early to mid-July based on last year’s dates of July 12 and 13. That means you need to start preparing now. 

How to Prepare for Prime Day 2023

There are several areas to consider in your Prime Day preparations, from content and advertising to pricing and fulfillment. To make sure you’re ready on every front, check out these helpful tips. 

Inventory Planning and Preparation

• Prep inventory. Ensure you’ll have plenty of inventory for Prime Day and the rest of the week thereafter. Forecast inventory demand by looking at your Prime Day sales from last year, as well as holiday performance. Remember, the last date to send inventory to Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is June 15. 
• Allocate inventory. Think through which SKUs you want to fulfill yourself versus externally through FBA. You may want to advertise the Prime badge on high-volume SKUs to encourage purchases, whereas you may keep lower volume or niche products merchant fulfilled. 
• Monitor account KPIs. No Amazon seller wants to have their account suspended on the platform’s biggest shopping day of the year. Double check your account KPI performance to avoid suspension during peak traffic. 
• Prepare internal teams. Inform your warehouse staff of critical deadlines and prepare them for inflated order traffic as Prime Day nears. You’ll also want to prep customer service for the possibility of increased message volume and return requests.
• Don’t forget other channels. The Prime Day “halo effect” has been known to increase sales on other marketplaces too. Plan accordingly by setting aside inventory and ad budget for other channels like Walmart, Target and eBay.

Fulfillment

• Expect delays. Set proper delivery expectations with your customers in anticipation of delays from major carriers. Review your carrier restrictions and capabilities for the Prime Day period so you don’t encounter any surprises. 
• Prep for order caps. While not extremely common, FBA does sometimes place order caps on volume. Keep an eye on your inventory performance indicator (IPI) to maximize allowed space and prioritize high-volume SKUs for FBA only. If needed, look at third-party logistics companies to diversify your fulfillment and accelerate delivery. 

Pricing Strategies

• Analyze pricing opportunities. Amazon’s business reports in Seller Central provide information like your Buy Box percentage over time and impression share. Assess your listings one by one for competitors and the areas in which they might be winning (e.g., price, Prime budget, etc.). 
• Build a repricer strategy. Use the Amazon Pricing Console to review competitor pricing, Prime designation, handling times, shipping prices and seller ratings. From there, you can build a repricing strategy around the opportunities you identify. 
• Watch multichannel pricing. Amazon is notorious for crawling other websites to monitor your pricing. If your prices dip on other sites, Amazon may remove the Buy Box altogether, confusing shoppers and leading them to competitors. Synchronizing your multichannel pricing ensures shoppers experience consistent pricing wherever they find your product(s). Plus, it keeps you in Amazon’s good graces.

Deals and Promotions

• Review previous year performance. Look at the success of your Prime Day promotions from last year. Then, evaluate what sold well in the past year and what’s trending now. Use these factors to determine what will perform best this year.
• Meet deal submission deadlines. The deadline for Amazon Lightning Deal submissions has already passed, but opportunities to promote other deals are still available. Create a coupon, share promo codes or use Prime Exclusive Discounts to stand out in search and product pages. There are no deadlines for these options yet, but the submission deadline is often the week before Prime Day. 

Monitoring Results and Reporting

• Determine how you’ll measure success. How will you know if you performed well on Prime Day? Set goals with metrics around revenue, profit, conversion rate or Buy Box percentage.
• Track seller metrics. Monitor your on-time shipments and cancellations three times per week (beginning at least four weeks before Prime week). Keeping a close eye on your seller health will prepare you for the influx of Prime Day orders to avoid suspension. 

Content and Advertising

• Launch ad campaigns — NOW. Now is the time to complete any new campaigns. This allows ample time for optimization and fine-tuning before Prime Day. Remember to include both FBA and merchant-fulfilled items in your campaigns to ensure comprehensive coverage of your catalog. 
• Optimize product pages. Prior to Prime Day, make sure your product pages are in tiptop shape by ensuring you have:
  • Six or more high-resolution images
  • 80 or more characters in page titles
  • Comprehensive product descriptions
  • Concise and captivating bullet points on features
• Use A+ content. Amazon A+ content can help you craft an engaging brand or product narrative with captivating visuals, customized layouts and a more appealing storefront. Consider adding A+ content to increase purchase values on Prime Day. 
• Select promo options based on your strategy. Choose the right ad types for your strategy. Product detail page (PDP) targeting helps you gain optimal product page coverage and high impressions, while sponsored brand video showcases top sellers with engaging video. Or, use Sponsored Display for targeting competitors and remarketing to new audiences. 
• Create a flexible budget. Look at month-over-month and year-over-year ad spend to better forecast your budget during this time. Consider adding more budget to well-performing campaigns and products you want to showcase. Your budgets will most likely run out during Prime Day, so check in regularly during Prime week to keep top performing campaigns fully funded. 

Are You Ready for Prime Day 2023?

Prime Day is like Christmas in July. Is your brand prepped and ready for the surge of traffic? Rithum helps brands feel prepared for any fluctuations year round with automated repricers, brand analytics, advertising strategy and expert guidance. 

Get more tips for Prime Day 2023 from our recent webinar, Countdown to Prime Day 2023: Top Strategies for Fulfillment, Pricing and Advertising. Or contact us today to request your own advertising analysis ahead of the big day.

The post Get Ready for Prime Day ‘23 with These Tips appeared first on Rithum.

Every year, we provide a list of our most-consumed blogs, webinars and resources. This year’s top 10 topics reveal readers had their sights set on winning in marketplaces, monitoring consumers’ changing behavior and improving their Amazon content. 

Join us as we take a look back at some of our most popular e-commerce resources from 2022.

10. [eBook] Getting Started With Amazon A+ Content 

This quick-start guide features ideas and inspiration for creating Amazon A+ Content, a premium feature of the marketplace that allows sellers to optimize their product descriptions with rich text, videos and images. New to A+ Content? Start with this guide.

9. [Webinar] Full-Funnel Commerce: How to Build an Online Strategy for the Entire Consumer Journey

Shoppers who are new to your brand are looking for different interactions than your long-time customers. In this webinar, Rithum Senior Product Marketing Manager Greg Ives and Product Marketing Manager Bradley Hearn explain which touchpoints and stages are key along consumers’ path to purchase. 

8. [Blog] The 3 Phases of a Winning Marketplace Strategy for Brands

Winning on leading marketplaces requires three things: successful launch, strategy and defense. In this recap of our eBook of the same name, we explain how to accomplish each critical phase.

7. [Blog] 3 Digital Marketing Success Stories You Have to See

How does an 85% increase in quarterly revenue sound? Or a 20% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS)? Get the full story of how Rithum customers AJ Tack, The Golf Club and The Candleberry Company use the platform to achieve phenomenal results (and you can too).

6. [Report] [Digital Commerce 360] 2023 Leading Vendors to the Top 1000 Retailers

In 2022, Digital Commerce 360 named Rithum the #1 channel management provider to the Top 1000 Retailers for the 11th consecutive year in a row. The annual report is packed with trends in e-commerce investments and the top leaders across 24 e-commerce categories, including fulfillment services, affiliate marketing and personalization.

5. [Blog] How Online Retailers Can Eliminate Excess Inventory

Global trends made excess inventory a hot issue among sellers this past year, and unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. In this blog, Product Marketing Manager Bradley Hearn provides 20 tips for addressing and preventing overstock. 

4. [Blog] Selling on Amazon — The 1P vs 3P Dilemma

Amazon offers both first-party (1P) and third-party (3P) seller relationships — but which one is better? It turns out there are a number of pros and cons to each arrangement. Learn them all in this deep-dive blog. 

3. [Blog] Rithum Enters into Definitive Agreement to be Acquired by Rithum

In September, ChannelAdvisor announced via press release that it had signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by CommerceHub, a leading commerce network connecting supply, demand and delivery for the world’s leading retailers and brands. The recap blog highlights how customers and partners will benefit from this exciting new chapter.

2. [Report] 2022 Online Consumer Behavior Global Report

How did consumers shop in 2022? Our highly anticipated annual consumer survey report revealed key findings around marketplace popularity, the continued importance of retail media and current consumer trends in discovering, browsing and purchasing products. 

1. [Webinar] 2022 E-Commerce Wrap-Up: Key Trends to Look for in 2023

Our top resource of 2022 provides a recap of the year and a look ahead at the key strategies sellers will need to tackle the trends and opportunities coming in 2023. Presented by VP of Digital Marketing Strategy Link Walls, the webinar features must-know charts, predictions and tips for thriving in the midst of economic uncertainty.

Never miss another Rithum blog or resource again, and subscribe to our blog for regular expert-led and guest contributor insights to stay current on everything e-commerce.

The post Year in Review: Our Most Popular Resources of 2022 appeared first on Rithum.

While 2021 and 2022 planning were characterized by pandemic considerations and an unprecedented e-commerce boom, marketers in 2023 have economic uncertainty and more marketplace competition than ever to contend with. We’ve put together our biannual e-commerce calendar to help you proactively execute campaigns with all the important dates you need to know for the first half of 2023. 

The calendar includes a list of best practices to tackle from January to June, including important e-commerce conferences, webinars, inspiring success stories, expert tips and more.

What to Look For in Q1 and Q2 2023

You may want to start the year off with a bang by experimenting with Google Performance Max or planning for excess inventory. Or, you may be looking forward to the Prosper Show and Shoptalk in Las Vegas in March. The Rithum calendar includes a ton of helpful tips and reminders, including:

• Important upcoming holidays with reminders to start planning
• Channel-specific tips for digital marketing and marketplaces
• Webinars, case studies, eBooks and other resources for guidance and tips
• And more!

Our biannual calendar goes beyond traditional spring holidays like St. Patrick’s Day and Memorial Day to help you plan for every audience and aspect of your e-commerce program. For instance, don’t forget cultural and regional holidays like Chinese New Year or times when schools and office buildings might be closed, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. These are prime opportunities to appeal to consumers’ urges to celebrate and shop available deals in their downtime. 

Whether you print it out or keep it safely tucked in your inbox, make sure your calendar stays visible so important dates and upcoming campaigns stay top of mind. 

Download a free copy of The 2023 Essential E-Commerce Calendar: January-June now for tips and dates to help you stay organized throughout the second half of the year. 

The post E-Commerce Calendar 2023: Essential Dates for January-June appeared first on Rithum.