Q4 is packed with important events for Amazon sellers: Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas, and Boxing Day.
A big chunk of your sales happens around this time of year, so it’s essential to be on top of your game before and during this period. That way, you can make the most of it and finish the year strong.
From optimized listings and inventory management to running effective ads, this article will cover 9 essential strategies for successfully navigating Q4, so let’s get started!
Strategy 1: Create Festive Listings
Brick-and-mortar stores set up festive decorations every year to attract customers, so why not do the same for your Amazon listings?
Festive-themed Amazon listings have been proven to attract more clicks and convert traffic at a higher rate, improving sales and ACoS.
To do so, you can try to include holiday themes into your listings with festive backgrounds plus references to gifts-worthy packaging as well as deals and discounts.
Take a look at the screenshot below; it shows a brand using A+ content with loads of Christmas decorations and colors.
More importantly, this brand highlights its giftable products which can quickly grab the eyes of gifts-seeking customers.
Another brand that sells shower steamers includes catchy language such as “A Perfect Holiday Gift” and “Stocking Stuffers Christmas Gift” in two of its images.
Strategy 2: Leverage holiday and gift-related Keywords
Just like with holiday-themed images, you should update your title, bullet points, and backend search terms to include keywords related to holidays and gifts to get a share of the seasonal traffic.
A good place to find such keywords is the “Search Query Performance” report. For those who don’t know, this report lists your top search terms for any period. It can be found under “Brand Analytics” on your “Seller Central” dashboard.
To find Christmas or any seasonal-related keywords, set your “Reporting Range” to “Monthly,” and pick November or December of last year as your date.
Go through the search terms that show up to find any high search volume holiday or festive-themed keywords.
The screenshot below shows the title and bullet points featuring keywords like “Gifts Box,” “Gifts for Book Lovers,” and “Ideal Gifts for Readers at Christmas,” making it clear this brand targets gift-seekers.
Doing this also allows Amazon to index this brand quicker for those keywords, which translates into higher organic ranks, more traffic, and more sales.
Strategy 3: Build a Holiday-Ready Storefront
Having a storefront on Amazon is already a win for your brand. But if you want to take it to the next level, it’s time to give your store some serious holiday vibes.
For one, create festive branding where you customize your store’s header, banner, and overall design with holiday-themed elements (for example: winter imagery, festive colors, and holiday-specific messaging).
You can also highlight seasonal products by featuring your best-selling and holiday-relevant products on the homepage. Moreover, make sure to add holiday deals to grab the attention of deal-seeking customers.
Finally, you might want to create a curated gift guide store page to help customers find gifts.
Strategy 4: Removing Slow-Moving & Excess Inventory
To have a profitable Q4, you don’t want to be overstocked during the holiday season.
That’s because if you’re overstocked, you’ll start racking up unnecessary storage fees, which will eat heavily into your profits.
So, to solve this, you need to start by figuring out which products are lying around in Amazon’s fulfillment centers and not selling.
To get started, go to your “Seller Central” dashboard, then click on “Manage All Inventory.” Next, select “Shipments” and hit the “Analytics” tab. This will take you to a page where you can review your inventory age and identify excess stock.
Once you choose the start date, the products, and the date range (weekly or monthly), Amazon will give you a list of recommended actions to reduce your excess inventory for the currently overstocked items.
You can pick which product’s data to view by using the “Products” filter; otherwise, Amazon will automatically display the data related to all of your products.
The recommended actions that Amazon might suggest are to create Sponsored Products ads, outlet deals, and sales.
Now that you have figured out which products are underselling, there are some extra strategies that you can apply to get these products to move faster in Q4.
For example, you can bundle your excess or slow-moving stock with top sellers and offer a discount. This strategy encourages customers to buy more while helping move inventory.
You can also use different promotion types (e.g. Percentage Off, Buy One Get One, and/or Social Media Promo Code) to entice customers with gift promotions and seasonal discounts.
However, if such tricks still don’t get your excess inventory selling, don’t lose hope since Amazon allows sellers to sell their excess products on “Amazon Outlet”.
Although your products will sell for half what they were initially worth, some find it a better scenario than ending up with unselling inventory that piles up storage costs.
Strategy 5: Forecast Demand
The last thing you want as a seller is to miss out on potential sales because you are out of stock during Q4.
So, the best strategy to solve this is to forecast customer demand for your products so that the correct inventory can be sent.
One way to do this is by using the “Restock Inventory” tool on your “Inventory Dashboard”.
As you can see in the screenshot, this tool shows you how many units were in demand during this period last year and how many units Amazon thinks you’ll sell this year.
You can use this data to figure out how many units you’ll sell in the upcoming period to stock the right amount of products.
Another way to forecast demand is to use last year’s data to predict this year’s Q4 unit sales for a specific ASIN.
To do so, head to your “Seller Central” dashboard, hover over “Reports”, then choose “Business Reports”. Next, choose the “Detail Page Sales and Traffic Report” by ASIN.
Select the ASIN for which you’ll forecast the unit sales, then pick a date range that aligns with Q4 from last year.
In the screenshots below, we selected the period from October to November, and then from November to December of last year.
Based on the report’s data, this ASIN sold:
October 2023: 23 units
November 2023: 39 units
December 2023: 100 units
So, it recorded:
69.5% growth from October to November 2023
156.4% growth from November to December 2023
334.8% growth from October to December 2023
Now, to estimate this year’s unit sales for November and December 2024, apply the growth percentages just calculated to the units sold in October 2024.
This brand sold 29 units in October 2024, so to estimate its sales in November and December 2024:
Estimated units to be sold in November 2024: 29 units * 169.5%= 49 units
Estimated units to be sold in December 2024: 29 units * 434.8%= 126 units
Another way to forecast demand is by using your competitor’s data.
This can be done easily using a third-party tool such as the Helium 10 X-ray Chrome extension.
Let’s say, for example, you are selling scented candles, and you want to know the sales lift your competitors experienced at the same time of the year.
All you need to do is head to any of your competitors’ product details pages and click on the “30-Day Revenue” option that Helium10 has.
Use the graph to find how many candles were sold on average during the run-up to Christmas last year.
Then, choose a couple of months before December to see, on average, how many units were sold. This should allow you to see the percentage by which the competitors’ sales went up.
Let’s say you calculated a 5x increase in your competitor’s sales in December of last year.
Multiply this increase by your sales for the same period to forecast the units you’ll need.
Strategy 6: Organic Ranking
Competition over ad space during Q4 is fierce. So, to stay profitable, you need to rank organically and not rely on ads and promotions alone to boost your sales.
And, of course, the sooner you start, the better your chances of dominating the search results when customers are ready to buy.
There are several tools you can use to identify the best keywords to rank for, so here they are:
Research Tools: Third-party tools from Helium 10 can help you look for medium-rank keywords. These keywords are ranked high enough to be visible but aren’t within the top 10. These keywords are easier to take to the top 10 than keywords that you aren’t showing up for at all.
To find medium-rank keywords for an ASIN, use “Cerebro” to filter for keywords where you rank 10 (minimum) to 30 (maximum). Then, enter a minimum of 100 in the “Search Volume” field, and finally, exclude any keywords with your brand name.
Top Search Terms: To find high-volume search keywords that are relevant to your product, head over to “Brand Analytics” on your seller dashboard and choose the “Top Search Terms” report.
It works by filtering the search terms that include the word or phrase you entered. So, in the example above, we entered “castor oil” to uncover the search terms that include that phrase.
Search Query Performance Report: Using SQPR will help you find the most important search terms for your products and how you perform on them in terms of click-through and conversion rates.
With this data available, you can find the list of keywords that you perform better than average on in terms of conversion rate which means they’ll be easier to rank for.
Now that you know where to find the best keywords to rank for, incorporate them in your Sponsored Products exact-match campaigns. Make sure to pair them with a strong “Top of Search” boost and increase your bids to maximize visibility.
Strategy 7: Leverage Dayparting
Dayparting is a PPC strategy that consists of identifying peak and off-peak periods when your performance varies and then increasing or decreasing your ad spend accordingly.
This helps you allocate the maximum amount of ad spend possible to your peak hours and lower spending on your off-peak hours.
This is particularly useful during Q4 because search volumes and ad spend are very high and it can be very expensive to advertise; so this allows you to keep your costs down by cutting ad spend on non-profitable hours.
As you can see in the screenshot below, this product’s ACoS (green line) increases on weekends while its sales (orange line) decrease. This is when dayparting comes in handy to help reduce costs and boost the ads’ efficiency.
But, before you implement dayparting, you need to know when your ads perform best. This means you need to analyze your ad spend, ACoS, sales, and conversion rates through “Amazon Marketing Stream”.
Make sure to collect your data consistently for 4-6 weeks for more accurate results.
To identify peak periods, focus on hours with a higher CVR or a lower-than-average CPC. These indicate times when ACoS is lower, and sales are higher than usual.
Highlighted in red are the off-peak hours, while the peak hours are those in green where sales and CVR are higher and ACoS is lower.
For the green hours, you can increase your bids and budgets and then decrease them or pause the campaigns altogether for the red hours to stop them from spending.
Strategy 8: Brand Defence Campaigns
Many of the customers searching for your products will end up seeing ads and organic listings from your competitors, and a reasonable percentage will buy from your competition instead.
Brand defense ads ensure that you take up all of these placements on Amazon when someone is searching for your brand’s products directly; this helps you secure all of these sales to yourself.
This can be done by targeting your brand’s ASINs or keywords.
In the screenshot below, you can see a Christmas tree topper product listing where competitors are directly advertising a cheaper topper to try snatching away customers.
This shows that the brand isn’t effectively defending its listing and is likely to lose customers to competitors.
However, this lip balm brand below is carrying out effective brand defense ads as it leaves no room for competing brands to advertise on its listings.
Brand defense campaigns come in two forms:
ASIN Targeting
These are campaigns where you target your ASINs in an exact match to make sure you cover all the placements that show up under your listings; this prevents competitors from advertising on them.
Keyword Targeting
These are Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns with broad, phrase, and exact match types. You can use these to target your brand’s keywords and defend the search results from competitor’s ads.
Strategy 9: Sponsored Display Retargeting
Many customers browse through different listings during Q4 and often forget your product, although they initially planned to buy it. That’s why you need to implement “Retargeting”.
Simply put, retargeting is a strategy that allows you to follow these customers with ads after they view your listing.
These customers are known as “high-intent customers” given that they are on the verge of buying your product and can potentially be swayed again to buy it.
All you need to do is set up a “Sponsored Display” ad campaign and choose “Views Remarketing” just like the screenshot below shows.
You can retarget customers who viewed your listing in the past 30 or 90 days—typically during the holiday shopping run-up—when they were exploring gift options and are now ready to purchase as Q4 ramps up.
Wrapping Up
In conclusion, Q4 is your golden opportunity to turn the year into a big win, so implement these strategies now to not just survive the holiday rush, but to thrive—and end the year on a high note!
