For marketplace merchants and ecommerce businesses, the end of the year is when they generate a significant portion of their revenue. Holidays and events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas falling in the last quarter of the year, give eCommerce businesses of all sizes to grow their online sales. Many marketplace sellers, especially those who are not having a solid action plan, find it hard to keep up with this holiday season. According to Google, up to 50% of this year’s sales will likely happen during the holiday shopping season. Your marketplace efforts during Q4 could make or break your fiscal year.

Spending mode on

Consumers have been consistently spending more money on Christmas gifts each year since 2008. Holiday sales statistics from 2020 prove just how much people love the tradition of Christmas gift-giving.

In the chart below, you can see that consumers spend more each year during the Christmas season.

‍

Discover our 5 key tips to optimize your marketplace sales and ensure you get your 2023 forecast.

‍

1. Have the right stock amount

New sellers may not realize how busy Amazon, Kaufland and Cdiscount can get at the last quarter of the year. If you haven’t stocked up on the right inventory, you’ll lose the game.

If you work together with us, we set up automated alerts so you’ll know when your inventory is low. Consider adjusting thresholds for the peak season. We recommend our clients to send Q4 inventory to our fullfillment partner in the end of oktober.

The Christmas selling season is short but you can get so much out of it. That's why it's so important to have your stock level on point.

‍

2. Optimize your productlisting for holiday related keywords

When a shopper goes to a marketplace, they have two primary ways to find what they want to buy.

  • Clicking Through Navigation — Using the navigation or the links across the top of the page, customers could click their way to the product they want. That does happen sometimes, but typically that’s not where shoppers start.
  • Entering Keywords — The most popular way for visitors to find what they want on marketplaces is to enter a search query into the search box. What that means is that you need to optimize your listing for the gift keywords entered, or you need to have a successful PPC campaign running that targets those keywords / phrases.

If you don’t optimize your marketplace listing for holiday keywords, it is highly unlikely that your product page will show in the organic search results. That means you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

‍

3. Offer freebies on your product listing

Offering something free like a cool accessory or a gift-card is a great strategy to boost sales and get additional reviews because customers love to get things for free. During the holiday season, people are in spending mode, so offering something free will be like a breath of fresh air to them, and may even encourage them to buy from you!

‍

4. Have a special holiday bundle/product listing

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: shoppers love a good discount. Even a little bit of savings can motivate action.

Product bundling involves offering a group of products together at a single discounted price. For example, you might sell three different categories like cookies, tappas and dried fruit on your marketplace shop. But you could bundle them together in a special holiday set and allow customers to purchase them together at a discount

5. Customize your Amazon Storefront

Amazon storefrontrs are never finalized, and it’s important to keep your store up to date for every big Ecommerce shopping spray. Shopping trends change, seasonality occurs, and new products launch. We’ve seen that on average, Stores updated within the past 90 days have 21% more repeat visitors and 35% higher attributed sales per visitor.

Therefore, be sure to adjust your Amazon storefront during the Christmas season.

Conclusion:

Planning your Q4 selling strategy takes time and patience, and it is a process that you need to get started on much in advance. You will have to plan what you are going to do during the holiday season as well as after. Selling strategies , stocking up on inventory, optimizing product listing pages, and running PPC campaigns are all vital parts of the Q4 shopping strategy. Pay attention to every single aspect and constantly monitor everything to have a successful holiday season.

If you need help, whether it’s creating your holiday marketplace strategy or building a storefront, feel free to schedule a free 1:1 call with us. At Meezy and we can make your Christmas the best ever. ⬇️

‍