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Amazon Prime Day 2019 – If You Can’t Beat ‘em, Join ‘em

Amazon Prime Day is celebrating its fourth birthday this week. The event, taking place July 15 and 16 is being billed by Amazon as a “2-day parade of epic deals”. Epic it will be for merchants that are part of the parade, but what if you’re on the outside looking in? How can you make sure you capitalize on Prime Day?

Much has been written about how merchants can and should utilize marketplaces as part of an effective multi channel eCommerce strategy. Marketplaces like Walmart, Etsy, Amazon, eBay and others continue to grow and give merchants immediate access to millions of customers, an instant globalization strategy and automatic trust that can take them years to build on their own. However, orchestrating your marketplace presence and offerings with your own online store and other digital channels, your call center and physical stores can be challenging.

For some merchants, their eCommerce platform can present significant hurdles to selling on a marketplace. After all, many platforms just weren’t built for the world we live in today and don’t make it easy to synchronize product information, pricing and inventory across all customer touchpoints. All-in-one commerce platforms were primarily built for desktop and mobile browsing experiences and don’t make the catalog and pricing information you need to feed a third-party channel like Amazon accessible.

However, this is no excuse to sit back and let the parade pass you by. As we discovered in our latest consumer survey, 85% of respondents have purchased from Amazon in the last six months, with 80% rating their experience an 8 out of 10. The convenience Amazon offers as a marketplace for both merchants and consumers is undeniable.

This is why many merchants are going headless. Unlike all-in-one commerce platforms that tightly couple the storefront experience with back-end commerce functions, headless commerce was ultimately designed to adapt to the everchanging landscape of selling channels and touchpoints. Through APIs, developers can use the technology or customer experience platform of their choice to create any customer experience they dream up. With headless commerce you aren’t locked into the eCommerce platform vendor’s storefront templates and vision for customer experiences and selling channels. In the case of marketplaces, you don’t even have to worry about the front-end experience.

At Elastic Path, we pioneered headless commerce with a progressive API approach that is easy to use and accelerates the creation of commerce-enabled customer experiences but, we went one step further to make selling within marketplaces as easy as possible. We recently created an all new catalog syndication framework as part of Elastic Path Commerce that enables you to share catalog content and data to activate and sell through non-company owned touchpoints, including marketplaces. So, when customers scour the internet for the best deal possible on your products, they will find consistent information on your webstore, Google, Amazon and any other channel you sell through.

In 2018 Amazon sold $4.19 billion worth of goods on Prime Day, up from $2.41 billion in 2017. With growth rates of 60% and 75% in each of the last two years, Prime Day is likely to catch and surpass Black Friday and Cyber Monday as the biggest shopping event of the year in NA1. Isn’t it time you became part of the Prime Day parade?

1) Source: Internet Retailer, Fareeha Ali | August 8, 2018
https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/amazon-prime-day-data/