In the busyness of holiday campaigns and end-of-year wrap-ups, it’s tempting to leave 2023 planning on the backburner. But a whole new set of spring holidays will be here before you know it — and the early bird gets the worm.

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.

Consumers can hardly remember a time before they shopped on Amazon. Today, 54% of US consumers say they begin product searches there before looking anywhere else. 

But success with the world’s largest online retailer isn’t guaranteed. Without the chops to compete and put products in front of shoppers, brands and retailers won’t make it on the highly saturated marketplace. 

Rithum recently released a Comprehensive Guide to Amazon featuring the must-know strategies every Amazon seller should employ to succeed in such a competitive space. What are your brand’s strengths and weaknesses? Are you grabbing shoppers’ attention and ensuring their loyalty with seamless fulfillment? See what strategies put you ahead of the game.

The Multichannel Growth Flywheel

Simply listing your products on Amazon is no longer enough. The marketplace is now home to 1.9 million active sellers around the world — and they’re all vying for consumers’ attention. 

A growth flywheel is an effective, high-level way to structure your thinking as you develop strategies to succeed on Amazon and beyond. 

The flywheel helps assess and develop strategies in five key areas:

• Connect your products to consumers with error-free listings
• Market your products effectively to drive awareness and sales
• Sell your products by converting browsers into buyers at the moment it matters 
• Fulfill your customer’s expectations with fast, efficient delivery
• Optimize your Amazon strategies to constantly improve results

Let’s take a look at how each area helps you focus on essential selling tactics to become a successful Amazon seller.

Connect Your Products to Consumers

How do you want to sell on Amazon? Choose the best model for your business: 

• A first-party (1P) relationship where you sell your products to Amazon via Vendor Central. Your brand is responsible for advertising, promotions and shipping products to Amazon, while they control the pricing and inventory.
• A third-party (3P) relationship where you sell directly to consumers via Seller Central. You control the advertising, pricing, inventory and any fulfillment or logistics. 

Once you’ve decided how to sell, start your Amazon presence strong with error-free listings. The trick is meeting Amazon’s listing requirements while optimizing them to appeal to your target audience. However, every marketplace you sell on is different, potentially leading to listing errors that could cause your products to appear incorrectly or prevent them from showing up at all. Make sure your Amazon connections are error-free by ensuring your product data is clean, organized and in line with Amazon’s standards. 

Market Effectively to Drive Sales

Amazon Advertising helps sellers boost awareness among consumers and increase sales. But with so many sellers to compete against, a simple manual campaign isn’t likely to cut it. The most successful Amazon sellers vary their marketing across ad types:

• Sponsored Products — keyword-driven ads that appear alongside organic search results to promote individual listings
• Sponsored Brands — top-of-page ads that build awareness for your brand among browsing shoppers 
• Sponsored Display Ads — display ads that appear on product detail pages, the Amazon homepage or third-party apps and websites

Investing in a mix of Amazon ad types ensures different consumers see your products at various stages. Not sure where to start? Rithum offers a complimentary advertising analysis where our Amazon experts will take a look at your Amazon Advertising account to identify areas for optimization.

Sell at the Right Moment

A growing number (41%) of consumers now begin their search on Amazon when their intent is simply to research. The more accurate your product listings, the more trust you build during the consideration phase for eventual purchase.

Put yourself in consumers’ shoes when writing product descriptions. What do they want to know? How will they search and arrive at your product? Research similar products to see what competitors are saying, and optimize your descriptions with the most accurate and detailed keywords possible. 

You can also improve sales by keeping prices competitive — but no one has time to manually monitor price variations across hundreds of comparable sellers. Automated repricing tools automatically adjust your prices to remain competitive and align with your goals. Choose from a marketplace repricer, which uses algorithmic pricing technology to help you win the Buy Box or Best Offer position at the highest possible price, or a velocity repricer, where prices are adjusted automatically based on your goals — whether you want to extract more margin on fast-selling products or lower prices when sales are slow.

Fulfill Amazon Buyers’ Growing Expectations

Consumers choose Amazon Prime for its fast, convenient two-day shipping, and they now expect sellers across channels to keep up. Luckily, Amazon offers two options to make fulfillment fast and seamless:

• Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). Send a portion of your inventory to Amazon, and they’ll handle the rest. FBA also manages customer support and returns, removing the hassle from your team.
• Seller Fulfilled Prime. You entice customers with the Amazon Prime name and shipping guarantee, but call the shots on packing and shipping. You’re also responsible for returns, which are automatically authorized by Amazon.

Want to understand the advantages and disadvantages of Amazon fulfillment options even better? Check out these 5 Differences Between Fulfillment by Amazon and Seller Fulfilled Prime.

Optimize for Improved Results

Most consumers now look at reviews before making an online purchase. That means your customer satisfaction rating and reviews must accurately reflect your products to entice new buyers. Stay on top of your customer satisfaction levels by monitoring key metrics, such as order defect rate, return dissatisfaction rate and late shipment rate. Once you become a certified seller, Amazon provides a wealth of data to help you monitor these categories.

Optimizing your Amazon presence also means demonstrating growth. You can expand your presence by going global across the marketplace’s 19 countries of operation. Selling internationally increases brand awareness and expands your customer base. To get started, the Amazon Global Selling program allows you to “test the waters” of cross-border trade.  

Don’t just list on Amazon. Rithum solutions help you execute flywheel strategies to succeed on the world’s most popular marketplace and across more than 340 other channels. 

Get more Amazon selling tips and best practices in our new Comprehensive Guide to Amazon and webinar, Developing a Comprehensive Approach to Amazon: Strategies and Tips for Marketplace Success.

The post Everything You Need to Know About Selling on Amazon appeared first on Rithum.

This time of year brands and retailers are in the midst of the holiday rush as consumers hurry to buy gifts for family and friends. But, as 2021 winds down, it’s time to think about the bigger picture and look at what we’ve seen and learned in e-commerce as we head into 2022.

Lessons Learned

We know that the pandemic impacted retail sales and the consumer journey over the past couple of years. 

We are seeing an accelerated adoption of e-commerce as an effect of the pandemic. This has resulted in a massive investment in e-commerce infrastructure led by Amazon. The marketplace has invested billions of dollars in fulfillment capacity from more warehouses to transportation.

The increase in fulfillment capacity has given buyers more options to receive their orders whether it’s curbside pickup, buy-now-pick-up-later or shorter delivery times. 

Unfortunately, complex circumstances created by the pandemic have resulted in supply chain challenges. Stock availability has been impacting every part of retail, especially shipping. These difficulties are likely to linger well into the new year for many brands and retailers and, in some categories, could have a measurable impact on sales.

Trends for 2022

The acceleration of e-commerce is no secret to retailers. With Amazon leading the way as an example of how retail media spending can drive growth, other retailers, such as Walgreens and CVS, have been inspired and are in the process of launching their own retail media markets.

E-commerce has been a part of social platforms for quite some time now. It has become an even more frictionless experience, especially for mobile devices. Users see ads targeted to their interests and with one button can click through to make their purchase. This smooth transaction can be seen with Instagram ads and, more recently, TikTok. 

While social platforms are tracking users and their activity, we are seeing privacy and regulatory battles intensify. The prevalence and tracking power of the cookie has begun fading with the implementation of privacy technology, arriving with acronyms like ITP, ATT and IDFA. Increasing adoption of this technology as well as potential new regulations and laws will require marketers to change. As the old methods to target, track and attribute the results of ad campaigns begin to become obsolete, companies will need to innovate and adapt to remain in touch and engaged with their consumers. 

Strategies for Success

So, where do you start? Take inventory of your e-commerce health and evaluate your digital shelf to ensure optimal product content. How are your products presented? Is your pricing competitive?

Here are a few specific strategies to consider executing in the new year.

Be everywhere. The consumer is looking at every possible option on every site. It’s important to be where consumers are shopping or looking at advertisements, including Amazon, Walmart, social media platforms and other online locations. Think about how your business is reaching consumers currently and find the gaps.

Diversify your approach. Diversification builds durability. This means diversifying where you receive your supply, which channels you are selling on, which regions/countries you are reaching and what fulfillment options you offer. As you think about expanding to new channels, factor in the customer acquisition costs. Think about the channels you are expanding to and the cost for advertisement. What’s your strategy for moving to new channels and have you budgeted for it? 

Focus on fulfillment. The last mile has gotten competitive, especially with features such as shortened delivery times, free shipping and buy-now-pick-up-later options. The consumer journey is important at every stage including the fulfillment options. Set yourself apart from other retailers and brands to get consumers their products when and how they prefer.

What else should you look out for in e-commerce in 2022? Watch Vice President of Digital Marketing Strategy Link Walls discuss what we’ve learned this year and what actions we can take to succeed in 2022. 

The post Perspectives in E-Commerce: Key Trends, Challenges and Actions for 2022 appeared first on Rithum.