Amazon Prime Day: How the New Date will Effect Q4 Results

TODAY'S EPISODE:

00:42

Hello, Episode Number 49 of marketing interruption. I'm your host, Andrew Maffettone. Today, I want to talk a little bit about Amazon Prime Day, its post about, let's put it this way. As I'm filming, this is supposed to be the first week or two of October, it hasn't been announced yet. When this comes out, which I think is the possibly October 1, I would hope that it would have been announced by now I actually spoke with my Amazon rep today who still hasn't signed off on or not signed up, but gotten a approval to tell us when it's going to be. But they pretty much told us it's usually the first couple days of the week. And it's going to be either the first or second week in October based on the promotions and the FBA inventory and all the other deadlines that they kind of put into place. So the interesting thing is, is it's now going to be in q4. So it's gonna kind of be a question of how is q4 gonna look this year is and I hate to say it because everyone keeps saying it. But this year is very unprecedented. where essentially, these numbers that we're going to have this year are going to screw everyone up, you're going to assume that in October, you usually do x growth, and this year, you're gonna do y growth. And then next year, you're gonna be like, well, we had a great October and we like, but you're gonna have to remember that Prime Day was in October this year or q4 was in q4 this year. So it's almost like

02:06

kind of like, what the hell is it called, like a Hall of Fame sort of thing where this whole year is just gonna need to have an Asterix* on it. So it's gonna be interesting that the thought for a while was that Amazon Prime Day was going to screw up the Black Friday Cyber Monday sales. I thought that everyone was going to do all their shopping in October for Prime Day and it was going to limit the amount of shopping that's done in November to have a big shopping day like Prime Day be so close to Black Friday, Cyber Monday. It seems like that would make a lot of sense. Amazon was originally trying to have it in late October. But it seems now that it's going to be in the first week or two which gives them a good month and a half or so from the whole Black Friday weekend. Of course, Black Friday is a different conversation where some people aren't opening for Thanksgiving this year, which I love. And but some people are doing Black Friday Cyber Monday sales like all of October and November like I think Home Depot's doing that. So this whole year in terms of shopping is going to be crazy. But the other side of this is that a lot of people are still saying home. If you're watching me on YouTube, you can see on home. So a lot of people are still saying home a lot of people over the summer since everything that had happened Coronavirus, got people to shop online more often and get a little bit more comfortable with it. So I actually think that even though Prime Day is going to be in q4 this year, and it's going to be earlier, I don't think it's going to have any effect on the Black Friday Cyber Monday sales, I think they will be just as good as projected, if not even better, because of how many people are going to be home. The issue is actually going to be the supply chain. The issue is really now is how many of these sellers that are offering all these products are going to be able to keep up with this demand in such a short period of time, let alone the fact that a lot of them are already having issues because of how much business they did over the summer. Some sellers, that's not the case. I understand not everyone had a gangbuster summer. But a lot of the sellers we work with did because of just the way that everything kind of shifted. So the question is really going to come down to if you do so well, in October for Prime Day, are you going to be able to figure out that influx in inventory, let alone a month and a half later? If you have enough on hand? Fantastic. What if you need to have it manufactured? Is that something you should have already put in a request for like, how is that whole process going to work? So that's going to be something that's going to be very interesting, I actually think that on a sales side, we're gonna have a great q4, it's probably going to be much, much bigger than anyone ever expected. Even with everything going on, I think it's gonna be huge. For an operational side, I'm glad I don't do operations. Let's put it that way. So I think it's gonna throw off everyone's metrics like I I mentioned so I would say, obviously, like I've always said, make sure that you take into account everything. Write down all the campaigns that you did all the amount you spent the day like get as detailed as you possibly can. But whatever spreadsheet you have that is keeping this tracking, I would put an Asterix* on it. And make sure you have a note somewhere that tells you like Prime Day was in October this year. But that's what I wanted to touch on today. So good luck for Prime Day. I'm sure it's probably any day now based off when they think this podcast coming out. But I will talk to you all tomorrow rate review, subscribe to them.