Instead of asking "When am I getting a promotion?" or "How much of a raise am I going to get?", I'm thinking, "How can I take this chunk of money and invest it to make a greater return?" Or even more importantly, "Who in my life can I help?"
I know what itâs like to not be able to afford a cheeseburger. I know what itâs like to be hungry. So planning out where I put my money and making sure I use it well and invest it back into the community is so important.
I love teaching because itâs giving other people the opportunity to think differently like I do. I will be open and honest with you about my victories and failures so you can get a realistic idea of what itâs like.
Today I want to teach you how to boost your product sales through a strategic price drop, running sales, and running promotions.
Strategic Price Drop
This means you keep dropping your price if someone is selling for cheaper under your same listing. If your product is not private label-able, or it has a patent and you are approved to sell it but other people are too, then other people can easily list for a lower price under your listing. You need to keep dropping your price to be lower than theirs. But if you keep dropping yours and they keep dropping theirs, eventually someoneâs not going to make a profit anymore, and thatâs scary.
If you weather the storm and keep doing it until they give up, itâs amazing what will happen. Itâs like playing poker. You make them think you can do this forever. Of course you canât, but you make them think that while theyâre losing money, and at some point theyâre going to stop. They surrender, they leave, they raise their price. Then you can bring your price back up again. That is one way to win when someone else is selling your product.
Running a Sale
Iâm going to show you how to put a sale price on your items, itâs super easy. Go into Seller Central and click on Manage Inventory, then find the product you want to put a sale on. You want to sell more of it, so create a little sense of urgency. Click âEdit.â
Once youâre editing, go to âOffer.â Scroll down to the price.
If someone is selling for a lower price than you, you can click âMatch Low Priceâ to match the competitorâs price. Keep in mind that if they offer free shipping, but you require shipping costs, your matched low price will adjust to include that shipping so that itâs still competitive.
To run a sale, all you have to do is type in a price in the âSale Priceâ column for how low youâre willing to sell it for. Pick the Sale Start Date and End Date, the days you want the sale to start and end on, then hit âSave and finish.â It might take up to 15 minutes to show up, but itâs that easy.
On the product page, it will show this discount. Itâs going to highly increase the chance this item will sell, and sometimes, thatâs all you need to get boosted. If people start buying it and are more interested because itâs on sale, itâll start selling better on its own.
Itâs all about strategy. You donât want a product to just sit there. You want to try different things, find out what works, but always make sure you know your numbers and are not losing profit.
Running A Promotion
How do you run a promotion? Itâs very simple. First, go to Advertising, then Promotions in Seller Central.
Letâs say you want to create a Buy One Get One promotion. Click âCreateâ under that option.
âBuyer purchasesâ is at least two. This means theyâll âbuyâ two, but one item will get the promotion applied to it, so theyâre actually buying one and getting the other free.
âPurchased itemsâ lets you select what item or group of items the promotion is applied to. If you havenât already created a product selection with those items in it, go ahead and click that.
Itâs pretty simple: I usually select âASIN Listâ as the type of product selection, and then all you have to do is copy and paste the ASINs of the products you want in this group and give it a name. You can add up to 4,000 ASINs or only do one if you want to.
âBuyer getsâ free items, so they get one free if they purchase one.
âApplies toâ purchased items, so itâs going to be the same item that they add to cart, not another one from your store.
âBuyer benefit applies to a quantity ofâ one item when the buyer purchases at least 2. This just means that the promotion will apply to one item when the buyer adds two, so theyâll pay for one and get the other free.
Under Advanced options thereâs only âExclude items,â which I donât want to do, so we can skip that.
Next, you can pick your start and end dates for the promotion. I usually do a month.
The âInternal Descriptionâ just means what you call your promotion so you can identify it; it wonât be shown anywhere publicly on Amazon.
Now, letâs say you want this promotion to use claim codes. These settings are very important if you are.
Single-use means a generated code can only be used once. Group codes are for if you want a code to be used for a group of people, so the code is used over and over again by multiple people.
For single-use codes, that code can only be used one time, period. âOne redemption per customerâ, however, means that a customer can only use a code connected to this promotion once. So if you generate 14 different codes, they can only ever use one of them if this option is checked.
For claim code combinability, I put unrestricted. This just means it can be combined with other codes or promotions if there are any.
After youâre done with these, hit âReview,â and if everything looks good, you hit âSubmit.â
Now we have our finished promotion. Now I need to create the claim codes so that people can enter them in to use the promotion. If I wanted to, I could make it a public promotion so that people can see it on the product listing and apply it from there, but I want to go one step further and actually send out the individual codes.
