Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us here today for Amazon Prime Day 2020: Preparing for E-Commerce's Biggest Event. My name is Bradley Hearn with ChannelAdvisor, and I will serve as your moderator for today's event. Prime Day, the biggest event in e-commerce in our hemisphere, needs no introduction. With billions of dollars in global sales and a significant ripple effect that results in increased activity on other marketplaces, other channels, other search engines and other web stores, it's really difficult to overstate the global impact. Although this year's affair has been slightly delayed due to COVID-19, it's likely to be just as powerful, this time with even more buyers becoming accustomed to searching for and buying products online. We're thrilled today to have 2 of our Amazon marketplace experts in the house to talk about the event: Danielle Siansky and Matt Walters. They'll discuss what you can do right now to plan for maximum success as a seller participating in Prime Day. But first, before we begin, I'd like to cover just a couple of housekeeping items. [Operator Instructions] Today's presentation will last approximately 30 minutes, and we'll also take some time at the end for some Q&A. After the webinar is over, there'll be a short survey that pops up. We would love if you could take just a couple of minutes to provide your feedback. Let us know how we did and what you'd like to hear about in future webinars. And finally, yes, this webinar is being recorded and will be available on demand. We'll send out a link to the recording and a copy of the presentation slides in the next couple of days. So look after that in your inbox. And if you haven't already, make sure you visit our blog at channeladvisor.com/blog and subscribe to keep up with the latest at the e-commerce industry, and you won't miss out on any upcoming webinars. Before we dive in, I just want to take a little bit to say who ChannelAdvisor is in case you're logging on today and aren't familiar with what we do. ChannelAdvisor's platform serves as a single centralized integration point for thousands of brands and retailers all around the world to help them automate and optimize all of their e-commerce operations, whether that's a single marketplace or dozens of marketplaces, digital marketing channels, first-party integrations or third-party fulfillment solutions. But we're more than just a platform. As your partner in e-commerce success, we're here to help you efficiently acquire more customers and increase sales. Our Managed Services team works with leading brands and retailers every day to optimize their e-commerce efforts, expand to new channels and boost their bottom line. Our mission is to connect and optimize the world's commerce. We're privileged to work with more than 2,600 customers around the world in many different capacities. We've been thrilled with the response we've had from the industry, including being named the #1 marketplace management vendor to the IR 1000 every year since 2013. Okay. We're done with the housekeeping and now it's time to welcome our speakers, Danielle Siansky and Matt Walters. Matt is a Client Strategy Manager on the digital marketing side of the house. He works with brands and retailers to grow their business on Amazon by building a strategy that provides data-driven results. Matt primarily helps Amazon vendors grow their brand across Amazon and provides a complex advertising strategy that gives their products visibility in the most competitive markets. Danielle is also a Client Strategy Manager but on the marketplaces side of the house. She works for -- with ChannelAdvisor clients to optimize their presence on marketplaces like Amazon and build out strategies specific to each client's goals to help them succeed on any of the various marketplaces that we partner with. Danielle and Matt, thank you so much for joining us today. I know you've got a lot to cover, so I will let you jump right in. Danielle, do you want to take it away?

Hi, everyone. So we are going to be starting with a look-back at Prime Day 2019. And then on the market side -- marketplaces side, I will be covering everything that we need to do to prepare your account, working on preparing for promotions and preparing for any fulfillment that will be happening during Prime Day. Next slide. All right. So just a quick look-back at Prime Day 2019. In the last 5 years, Prime Day has increased tremendously in both volume and scope. In 2019, we saw $7.2 billion globally during a 48-hour period. There was a 71% increase from 2018, which was a 36-hour period, and over 175 million items were sold. There's been a big increase in international sales for the past 2 years, and we just thought it would be interesting to see some analytics from Adobe, where we had a 68% year-over-year increase in sales for large retailers and 28% year-over-year increase for niche retailers. We're definitely really excited to see what 2020 looks like, especially with the current climate with COVID. Next slide. All right. So now that we have an idea of what to expect for this year's event, let's move on to our first major component to success, which is how we -- which is how to market or present your listings. I list this as our top priority because having quality content, images and pricing as well as having all listed items live on the platform is the first step to success on any marketplace, let alone on a big-traffic event such as Prime Day. Once you have decided on the product assortment that you'd like to offer from your catalog, content optimization is going to be your first stepping stone to success. You need to ensure that your product titles represent your item while still meeting the character min/max that Amazon has set both for desktop and mobile views. Another key component of content that often gets overlooked are the feature bullets. The feature bullets are the key item features that a buyer gets to review next to the item's image and the Amazon Buy Box itself, which we'll talk about a little later on. Make sure these feature bullets vary by item and are descriptive without being too wordy. By now, we all know that having quality image is a key to positive buyer experience. So the goal is to have at least 3 images, but I like to say at least 3 to 5 images per listing. And it's important to also offer zoom functionality whenever possible. Next slide. Next and equally as important as product content optimization is ensuring that all of your items remain live and listed on the Amazon platform. I have listed both the link to ChannelAdvisor support and Amazon support for you to utilize to help you make sure that these items are live and listed for Prime Day. Next slide. So if you're not currently checking your Account Health metrics on a regular basis, consider this your reminder to start. If you're not aware of any product or customer complaints, return or refund requests or late shipments, you could be unknowingly and negatively impacting your ability to succeed on the Amazon marketplace. You can find this feature under Amazon Seller Central. Go to the Performance tab, and you will find Account Health. There's also another feature on Amazon Seller Central. If your brand is brand registered, Amazon offers insights from the customer. This feature is called the Voice of the Customer. This could also be found in Seller Central under Performance, and it's called Voice of the Customer. Next slide. All right. And then last and probably most important, now that we've discussed how to best optimize your listings, we need to ensure that they will sell successfully. To do that, I think it's important to focus on pricing optimization. If you have not turned on the ChannelAdvisor Amazon repricer or if you have not yet migrated to our Amazon repricer, your prices are not being optimized as efficiently as possible. The repricer also provides you access to the pricing console, which is a critical reporting tool towards understanding your competitive environment and Buy Box percentage on Amazon. In this tool, you can save views to keep all critical information in one report as opposed to having to open multiple tabs in ChannelAdvisor and Seller Central. For Prime Day prep, you'll really want to hone in on any SKUs that are losing the Buy Box at your minimum price as these are key missed opportunities for these items. You'll need to do a deep dive into other factors that may be influencing the Buy Box selection such as if your competitors are pricing lower than you or if they're offering a faster, less expensive shipping method. Now we're going to talk about optimizing promotions for Prime Day. So once you've optimized your content and pricing to the fullest extent, you want to advertise your items on Amazon's platform. Depending on your business model, there are several ways to achieve this. So we'll start with the 3P seller scenario. If you are a reseller or a nonbrand owner, I recommend participating in both Sponsored Products and the Amazon promotion such as percentages off, which you can find in -- after checkout; or BOGO!s, so -- such as Buy 1, Get 1 off. But if you do own a brand and have enrolled in Amazon's Brand Registry services, your best bet would be creating an Amazon storefront and creating sponsored brand campaigns. Otherwise, the most well-known advertising method for Prime Day are Lightning Deals, which I know Matt will talk about more to later. Amazon also offers Sponsored Products. And we also -- Amazon also offers coupons and Prime exclusive discounts. So again, I'll let Matt talk more to Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products and product display ads. But similar to Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products, product display ads for 1P sellers are shown on product listing pages and are an easy way to increase your overall brand awareness. The biggest benefit to product display ads are that you're getting targeted by specific product or interest groups, which gives you the opportunity to add your advertisement to a competitor's product page. And then -- sorry. Thanks. So then additionally, as Prime Day has gained popularity and site traffic, other marketplaces have recognized that they need to be competitive during the same time frame in order to drive sales and traffic to their platforms. In the past years, we have seen eBay, Target and Walmart and other marketplaces offer major sale events. We have previously seen these marketplaces attempt to make their mark by offering free shipping and item sales throughout all items and sellers, not just on specific products as Prime Day is famous for. So any changes that you make to optimize listings on Amazon should be replicated on your competing marketplaces as well. Okay. So our next major area of focus will be on fulfilling all orders from Prime Day. As the name suggests, Prime Day is specifically focused on buyers who have subscribed to the Prime service through Amazon, and the majority of the site's deals will focus on items being sold and fulfilled under Amazon's multiple Prime offerings. These include Seller Fulfilled Prime and Fulfilled by Amazon. Seller fulfilled Prime allows sellers to have the Prime badge on all eligible items and is available by application to sellers who are in good health standing on Amazon and can offer 2-day shipping on any eligible item. I do want to note at this time Amazon is currently not accepting any new applications. But if you have already done the trial period -- have applied and done the trial period, I do suggest looking into offering Seller Fulfilled Prime, especially for Prime Day. So FBA, Fulfilled by Amazon, is probably the best-known type of Prime shipping. Here, sellers send an inventory to the Amazon warehouse location for a fee, and Amazon packages and ships any orders that come in through your Seller Central accounts. Amazon FBA is a great option for sellers who currently participate in SFP but still want to make the most out of Prime Day offerings and set their listings apart from other non-Prime options. Next slide. And don't worry if your -- if Prime shipping is not an option for your business at this time. Many shoppers will use the Prime filter to search for items and deals on Prime Day, but the shopping holiday is also bringing in many non-Prime shoppers who still look for top deals. For anyone who is not able to do SFP or FBA, free shipping is always the way to go during the actual Prime Day event, ensure you are being clear about your lead time and delivery time frame fulfilled by -- for -- fulfilled by matching orders as well. And that is it for me on the marketplaces side. I'm going to hand this off to Matt now, but please let me know if you have any questions in the Q&A section of the presentation.

Awesome, Danielle. Thank you for going over the really crucial pieces to the Amazon landscape and making sure your product data is up and running and looks optimized. So a few pieces of the agenda that we're going to cover today initially out of the advertising side, preparing your account for Prime week. So this is going to cover anywhere from optimizations to budgeting, to campaign relevancy that can be applied previously. Secondly, we're going to be looking at Prime Day strategies. That's going to be around promos, budgeting and monitoring, making sure your account's always online, making sure your budgets are increased enough to last throughout the day and also to identify which promotional strategy could be available for you. And then lastly, I'd like to cover some Amazon Advertising new features. This is going to be around the brand store, around Amazon posts and some of the new sponsored brand and sponsor display targeting options that are going to make your brand shine throughout Prime Day. So the first part is preparing your account for Prime Week. So when we're looking at preparing your entire advertising account, there's 3 really crucial pieces that are going to be impacted. The first piece is going to be optimizations. So this could include negative keywords. Inefficient ads are just wasted spend by inaccurate bids or daily budgets that just does not make sense to pair with your strategy. Negative keywords are ultimately going to save you from that unwanted search term or that unwanted spend that could cause your ACoS or ROAs to continue to climb. And that goes the same way with inefficient ads where we see specific spend and really no orders and driving up spend without that return behind it. And all those together are really what we're going to see combined with wasted spend. So next, with budgeting. This is the most crucial piece when preparing your account for the Prime Day and ultimately Prime Week as the increase in traffic is going to be through the roof. So I think there's 3 initial pieces that are really crucial, especially if you are organizing your portfolio with a budget cap or a monthly budget cap. If you are organizing campaigns with portfolios, make sure those budgets are clear where they can continue to grow throughout the week. Don't have them set where they could be not delivering. And ultimately, make sure your campaign budgeting is set where -- if you notice your campaign is running out throughout the day previous to Prime Week, that's going to be a good indicator to bump that up a little bit. Make sure you have that room for the campaign to spin naturally throughout the increase in traffic. It's really crucial to really make sure that all of these steps with budgeting are in place because once your campaign goes out of budget and you're not able to identify that, whether that's on Monday or Tuesday of those 2 Prime Days, it could really be -- it could be really detrimental to the advertising success you could have. And then lastly is relevancy. So Amazon Advertising and the algorithm that is built into the platform is really keying off of relevancy. Launching new campaigns a week or 2 before may be sufficient for some. But if you have a new product, a new strategy that you want to put in place with new targeting options, it's good to have at least 4 weeks of data. Then you can really make those major adjustments, whether it's optimizations and negative keywords, removing ads or making those bid adjustments that could be really crucial to win the auction during Prime Day. Next, please. So the next topic we're going to talk about is Prime Day promotional strategies and how we can really push those certain promotions that could fit well with your strategy. So there are several different options when we're looking at Lightning Deals. Increasing daily ad spend and monitoring is going to be a few topics that we should be considering as we do wait for Prime Day. Next one. So next piece with promotions. Whether you're an Amazon vendor or an Amazon seller, these are almost identical. We'll start with the Amazon vendor side of things. So we're going to have listed price discounts, Lightning Deals, BESTDeals, promo codes and coupons. As you can see in the picture on the right-hand side, that's going to be a screenshot directly from Vendor Central that gives you the ability to apply certain Lightning Deals to your products and BESTDeals. And that's going to vary between which item. And given Prime Day, they usually require a little bit more incentive up front that will vary per category. On the Amazon seller side, we're going to see several different other options that Danielle hit on. We're going to see social media promo codes. So if you are advertising off-site and you want to run a social media code to try to drive consumers back to the Amazon platform, you can do that, so -- along with -- paired with the Amazon Attribution program, which is still in beta. And if you do have access to that, it would be a good strategy to set those 2 up to really identify which traffic source is supporting that social media promo code. Free shipping. This is really tailored to a lot of our FBM client or FBM-fulfilled clients where Prime or FBA and seller fulfilled may not be available. Percentage off, Buy 1 Get 1 Free, straightforward there. And then within Amazon's Seller Central and leveraging 7-day deals and Lightning Deals, there are certain requirements that need to be put in place. So within Seller Central and if you are a third-party seller, your product must have a 3-star rating and it must have a sales history. You can include as many variations as possible. It can't be restricted, whether it's being in the advertising side restricted or suppressed across the platform. It's got to be in new condition. It's got to have nationwide Prime. And it must be compliant with other customer product review policies. So no major negative reviews or anything that has to do with complaints. Next, please. Lastly, when we're looking at promotional strategies, while you are setting these up in the back end, you may not be aware of the badges that are being placed across the platform that is viewable to the consumer. So if we take a look here, we're seeing several different types of our deals that we could get prepared for now and be ready to advertise when it comes to Prime Day. So we see here a sponsored brand ad with a limited time deal. This badge would be applied in your sponsored brand campaign across the top of search. And as you can see to the right, we have a coupon with a $2 off with the badge right under a sponsored product ad. And as you can see on the bottom 2 left, we see a 20% off. That is a Sponsored Display ad, which would be held right below the Buy Box, and that's showing 20% off. Then the last 2 images are going to be a limited-time deal, where it could be certain hours given on Amazon's preference. And then on the right, just some other screenshots of limited-time deals at sponsored branding campaigns, a Subscribe & Save deal with the Charman. And then a Deal of the Day with also a sponsored product ad. Next, I'd like to talk about budgeting in advance. So I hit on recently about checking your daily sponsored product budget cap. This is really crucial. Now with Amazon's new rollout of the advertising console, 1P sellers are starting to gain access to this, but a majority is all going to be tailored to your 3P Seller Central account that is being transitioned to the advertising console. This is really crucial. Say you are running a sponsored product budget cap that has been running on $500 daily. This is only going to be applied to sponsored products. But if this is set and you're unaware, your Sponsored Products campaigns will run out once that budget is hit. So it's really crucial to identify, a, if you are going to use it, give it a little boost; and make sure that it does have enough room to run throughout the day. Increasing daily budgets across your top-performing campaigns and campaigns that could be leveraging promotions. This is going to be crucial when you have certain badges like we saw on the previous slide that could be attracting more traffic than expected. So making sure that the budgets are healthy and identifying that you have those in place will help really drive those promotions and see success on the back-end sales side. And then lastly, I'd like to really hit on some budgeting tactics that could be crucial for your top-performing campaigns or if you're trying to target a specific placement across the platform. So I'd like to suggest 48 hours for these placements given that you could see some increase in spend, impressions and clicks across the board but may not see the conversions. So it would be good to test previously. So 3 of the dynamic bidding strategies that are available, one is a default with Amazon's dynamic bids - down only. This will allow Amazon to lower your bids in real time if it's unlikely to convert. The main dynamic bidding strategy up and down that could be really crucial for Prime Day to really outlast the competition, along with increasing that campaign daily budget, is our dynamic bidding - up and down. This is a real-time bidding strategy that Amazon can change your bids in real time to a maximum of 100%. This will allow you to take that bid to 100% if it's likely to convert, and that will be at Amazon's discretion. And then lastly is the fixed bids. Fixed bids are just what's set is likely what you're going to pay, but it would -- it could still drop below that certain bid given it is auction-style CPC metrics. And then the last piece is our bids by placement. So say you want to push one of your top items to the top of search on a specific campaign. This is where you can go in and add that certain percentage up to 1% all the way to 900%. So this would raise your bid of the entire campaign for that certain product if you do structure your campaign in that route. And then lastly is the product page percentages. This will allow you to really push all of your ads on the sponsored product carousel that are going to be below the fold across the PDP. Now when we look at strategies across the product detail page, when a consumer does lay down a product, they're most likely to find a sponsored product carousel and flip through 5 or 10 pages. Increasing this bid by placement product page percentage will give you a more likely chance to hold that placement throughout the day. Awesome. Managing alerts. So this is going to be really crucial as things are wonky. You can have your account go offline. You could have a payment issue. You could have your top-running campaign go out of budget and you would have no idea. So monitoring your advertising account, checking them several times a day to make sure that everything is running smoothly, making sure that you have no campaigns out of budget, you have everything in line, your payment method is up to date and making sure you have enough room for your campaigns to continue to last throughout the day. The other piece with this is monitoring the intraday sales data. So the screenshot below is strictly out of business reports, and this would -- is delayed by 3 hours, but it's still good to check in to see how your total sales account as far as the Seller Central side is really moving throughout these 2 Prime Days. And on the 1P side, we're going to be looking at real-time sales data that I believe only has 1 hour of delay. So checking in, making sure you're aware of what's going on and just monitoring throughout the day to make sure your Prime Day and Prime Days go as smooth as you like. Awesome. And then lastly, I want to talk about Amazon's new features. So Amazon has -- over the last year has rolled out some creative and custom assets that are super important for your brand. Branding is the -- is going to be one of the most crucial pieces to really standing out within Prime Day and not only day to day. So Amazon has given us features that can present your brand and it's just going to allow the consumer to digest it or discover. So there are several different types that I'd like to go over today. So Amazon stores, Sponsored Brands regarding video and custom image enhancements. Sponsored Display and their new product targeting for 3P sellers and their off-site remarketing. And then lastly is Amazon Posts. This is like the Instagram-style feed for Amazon, showing out your brand with a custom copy. And it sits on the mobile app only, and we'll be able to really showcase the lifestyle images that you could be using on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. So the first piece I want to talk about is the Amazon stores and the Sponsored Brands, the creative involved with making sure your brand is shining throughout these 2 days or for the week. So the first piece when we're looking at Amazon stores given that our sponsored brand campaigns are going to be driving direct traffic to the storefront is to leverage the new features. So Amazon has rolled out several new, creative assets that you can really get your full product display, whether that's a certain product set, a variation, and being able to really showcase what that offering can bring. So when we're looking at Amazon's new features with the brand store, they've rolled out background videos, a shoppable image where you say -- if you're looking at the Listerine brand store, you can find this Listerine brand store, and there will be 2 specific dots where if a consumer would highlight over that image, it would actually show Buy Now or Add to Cart, which would give them the ultimate conversion factor of oh, I'm going to add this to my cart immediately without having to go back and search for this product in the Search. There's also several other assets with background videos and videos that could really make your brand page shine. And then moving on to Sponsored Brands, which is going to be driving a majority of this traffic to your brand store, if you so choose, is sponsored brand video and the ability to add custom imagery to your sponsored brand campaigns. So Amazon has just recently rolled these 2 features out. The Amazon video gives you the ability to choose a 5- to 20-second video with 1 single product and apply it at the bottom of the search or throughout the search on several other pages. This will give you the ability to create a custom video tailored to your product and really try to draw a consumer into that ideal conversion spot. And then lastly is the custom image enhancement. So Amazon has been beta-testing these, rolling them out periodically. And the first one that you're going to see here is a mobile banner when we're dealing with one of our -- a cookware client. And so this gives you the ability to showcase that item in a lifestyle image that gives you -- that gives the consumer what that item would look like in their own home. This could be for fashion clients. This could be for home and garden. A majority of consumers are looking for that image or review with an image that really sets that item apart that would look great in their home. And I know Amazon is continuing to roll out how does it view in your home, but this is a great way to custom-advertise that. Next, please. Awesome. So Sponsored Display and promotional placements and off-site retargeting. So when we're looking at the Sponsored Display product targeting specifically for 3P sellers and for 1P when we're looking at audience targeting, Amazon has just recently rolled out the Promotion tab where we're going to be able to see which promotion could be applied to the Sponsored Display ad. This ad for product targeting for the 3P side will be listed under the Buy Box and listed under the bullets. So say you have an individual item that has very strong reviews, has a lot of sales velocity and you're going to run a strong promotion. It'd be definitely recommended to add this placement to -- whether a category or target specific competitors to try to conquest as much as you can. And then lastly, I really try to like -- to keep this as a strategy for Prime Week ultimately to try to drive consumers back to the product page is the Sponsored Display off-site retargeting. So Amazon has associated websites where when you implement a campaign of products, they're going to be shown a specific ad if they viewed your product or viewed a like product. So ultimately, the strategy of this campaign is to try to drive as much traffic back to the product page given that they are probably going to be spending the majority of their time on Amazon.com in general but ultimately to try to get them back to the product page, add to cart and convert. And then lastly, Amazon Posts. So this is a new feature that's been previously rolled out for mobile only. So this is going to be a straight social feed for your brand. It's going to be inspirational. You can add custom content with highlights regarding a specific product. It's very easy. It's like an Instagram post. You add your product, you add your title and then you can link a product. And it's also going to be applied across your product category. So for example, you roll out 5 different posts. It's not only going to be placed on your product page, but it can also be placed on the competition if they do not have any Amazon Posts campaigns running. And then lastly, Free. Anything that Amazon loves to roll out and it is free, I highly recommend participating and making sure that you have the brand data available to really drive that consumer to your product page. Awesome. And now I'd like to just give a few time lines. Please note these are tentative as Amazon has not announced an official day. But since the date has moved, the submission times could change as well. So currently, submission dates for Prime Day deals are going to be Prime-exclusive discounts on July 10. So that could be applied to 3P sellers and to 1P sellers. Prime Day coupons are going to be lead-up only on July 3, Prime Day lead-up and Prime Day exclusive on July 31 and then Prime Day only on July 31 as well. So that's the complete coverage here on the Amazon Advertising side, following these tactics and really getting prepared from optimizing your campaigns to identifying which promotional strategy could be crucial to grow your business. And ultimately, leveraging those new features to get creative and custom to really make your brand stand out is going to cause some decent success on Prime Day. Hand it over to you, Bradley.

Awesome. Thanks, Matt. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Just to kind of piggyback on that because we had a lot of people ask questions about when is Prime Day going to be? Do you know when Prime Day is going to be, or is it going to be in September? Matt, you can feel free to jump in and Danielle, but, I mean, the official answer is we do not know. We do not have any inside information. ChannelAdvisor does. There have been reports in The Wall Street Journal and other places that it might be September. But as Matt just said, those guidelines are sort of educated guesses kind of based on what we think and what we've been hearing in the same like, I would say, that you go to as well. All right. So let's get to some questions -- some additional questions from the audience. But While you are submitting these questions, I want to give a quick shout-out to 2 of our upcoming webinars. Coming up on July 21, we have our product release webinar. ChannelAdvisor, we're coming out with these features and new products to our solutions every month all the time and several times a year. We'll bundle those together, and we'll do a big release party for those. So July will mark a all-new collection of brand-new features across marketplaces, digital marketing, where to buy and a lot of our other solutions. It's really exciting stuff. In addition to that, on August 18, backed by popular demand, Matt will be back with Michael Schwartz, another one of our client strategy managers, to talk about Amazon Advertising in regards to the holidays, the holiday prep. Because believe or not, that's going to be right around the corner and you'll want to get going with that. And that will be also right before -- anticipated when Prime Day will be as well, so we'll probably throw out some Prime Day dates as well. Okay. Well, that said, let's get to the questions.

We actually have a lot of questions in, so let's -- we'll just crank right through them. Question one, "What if I don't have any preapproved Lightning Deals? Are there any other kinds of promotions I can run during Prime Day week?" Danielle, do you want to take that?

Yes. Sure. So if you don't have any preapproved Lightning Deals, you can submit coupons, Prime-exclusive discounts, especially if you are FBA or SFP. If you are non-FBA or SFP, you can still submit coupons. You can also run promotions through Amazon's promotion manager. I think both Matt and I spoke about this, but the promotion manager offers social media promo codes where you can generate custom codes for your buyers to submit during the checkout process, Buy 1 Get 1 promotions or the percentage off discounts that are shown after checkout.

Excellent. I have a follow-up question. "Can we propose our own Lightning Deals to Amazon?"

I'll take that one as well, yes. So unfortunately, Amazon does not allow you to propose your own Lightning Deals. Amazon has a set of guidelines that they use when recommending which products you can submit for Lightning Deals. So if you go into Advertising and then Deals, you will see which products Amazon is recommending for you to submit. But some of those guidelines that Amazon uses are being Prime-eligible in all regions and having a sales history in Amazon with at least a 3-star rating.

Excellent. Matt, I got one here for you. "How can daily budget pacing be handled through the month to stay on target but still push on a Prime Day -- on Prime Day?"

Yes. Certainly. So I think budget allocation is crucial, right? So if we -- once we get the date of Prime Day/Prime Week, it'll be great to allocate elsewhere. So identify a week or a couple of weeks where it could be slow, cut back a little bit, cut back 25%, 30%. Amazon recommends a 200% daily budget increase for those 2 Prime Days. So if you have to cut elsewhere, whether that's in the previous month or in the current month, take advantage there, restrict accounts, cut back and really get set up for the most busiest time of the week within Amazon. And also one thing to note, if we do see Prime Day in September, that's going to roll right into Q4. So making sure that participating and being able to really allocate that additional budget as we do head into probably e-comm's busiest time ever.

Excellent. Another question. "Where can I share my Prime Day deals?"

Yes. Certainly. So you saw multiple different ad placements or placements across the platform that you could showcase coupons, BESTDeals, Lightning Deals. Those are also going to be available on the brand store. So there's also certain modules where you can show BESTDeals, you could show top -- highly rated products, most purchased products. And those are also available in the Amazon Store Locator. But when you look back at this deck and take a look at those certain placements, those are going to be the majority of your BESTDeals, coupons and Lightning Deals and the placements across Amazon.

I see someone asked to repost the link for the Amazon Posts. As a reminder, we will send out these slides, so you'll -- we'll send out that link to you. And actually, I can then also chat that link to you as well. Another question. This one, I think, is for Danielle. "What if we have high sales but not enough product reviews?"

Yes. So that's a great question. If you have high sales but not enough product reviews, Amazon offers this really cool program called the Early Reviewer Program. With this program, you can -- well, first, you can find it in Amazon in Seller Central, if you hover over Advertising in the Seller Central navigation and click on Early Reviewer Program. Amazon reaches out to previous customers who have purchased that specific product that you have enrolled in the program, and then they incentivize those customers with an Amazon gift card as a reward for leaving a review. There is a fee associated with this program. You'll be charged $60 for the parent SKU, but you're not charged that fee until someone leaves a review or a full year has passed since you've enrolled the SKU.

Excellent. Matt, another one for you. "I don't see a boost to my sales on Prime Day. What could happen if I don't change anything?"

Sorry, I was muted there. So yes, certainly, if you don't change anything and don't run any coupons, Prime Day BESTDeals, Lightning Deals, you could see a drop-off in sales velocity. Ultimately, when you're looking at sales velocity, that's your organic ranking in your specific category. You don't increase budgets. You don't increase bids. You keep your visibility relatively low. You are going to see maybe a flat or really not your best Prime Day looking back. So I definitely would recommend taking what it's worth and making sure you can at least apply some sort of promotional aspect, whether it's Amazon Posts that are free, redesigning your brand store that's also free and leveraging some of those creative assets and ultimately trying to put together a budget that is acceptable for your strategy and goals as you conclude 2020.

Excellent. One that's kind of related to it, and I know -- I'm sure it applies to a lot of people because people have limited budgets, but the question is, "If I have a limited budget, where should I focus my efforts?"

Yes. Certainly. With a limited budget, ultimately you would want to identify your products that are selling the most, right? If they have a high sales velocity, they have a lot of reviews, they have a strong backing with relevancy across the platform, it's really crucial to focus all your eggs on that specific product to make sure that they can continue to climb and stay present and move up that bestseller rank.

All right. We're almost out of time, so, Danielle, I'm going to give you one more and then we'll call it. "Thank you for explaining Buy Box parameters. I don't want to compete with Amazon. What should I do?"

Yes. So I spoke about this a little bit in the presentation, but we have the Amazon repricer. And with Amazon repricer, what I would recommend is using a custom, rule-based repricer, which has an option of choosing which merchants you don't want to compete with. And Amazon -- you're able to select Amazon as a competitor for who you do not want to compete with.

Excellent. Well, again, I think we're about out of time today. If you have questions that weren't addressed during the webinar, please email us at [email protected], and we will be glad to answer them. We also had some questions we were not able to get to. I apologize. We will follow up with you directly. And if we gather enough questions, we might even do a blog post or 2 of some Q&A. And if you'd like to let us -- learn more about ChannelAdvisor and ChannelAdvisor's Managed Services offering, including our consulting services, we'd be happy to take a look at your current strategies and walk you through any next steps that we'd recommend that you take in anticipation of Prime Day. I want to thank again Matt and Danielle for the great presentation and answering our questions. Don't forget, when we close the webinar, a short survey will appear. We'd love it if you could take just a minute or 2. Tell us how we did and what you'd like to learn about in future webinars. On behalf of myself and ChannelAdvisor, we hope you enjoyed today's presentation. Thank you and have a great rest of your day.