4 Reasons Amazon Lightning Deals Change Everything for Sellers

If you’re just starting out with your business, how do you get increased sales?

Sales are what drive your item’s Sales Rank on Amazon, and Sales Rank determines how well your product appears in search on Amazon.

Amazon has enabled third-party merchants to create sponsored results that will show up in search (as “Sponsored”), but now they’ve opened up a new tool to third-party merchants that in the past was available only to a select few sellers.

Amazon Lightning Deals to Drive Sales Online

Amazon recently began allowing merchants to create lightning deals.

Lightning Deals appear in the “Today’s Deals” section on Amazon.

A Lightning Deal is generally limited to a short period of time (6 hours) and displays to customers a deep price discount that you set.

Buyers also can see how many units are available and when the time runs out.

Example Lightning Deal

Why Are Amazon Lightning Deals So Effective?

Lightning Deals use sales principles such as these:

1. Scarcity

There’s only a limited quantity of the product available at the deeply discounted price. Once all the units available at that price are claimed, the promotion is done.

2. Urgency

Related to scarcity, urgency is created with a limited time available at the discounted price. It’s not enough to just have a time limit; the customer needs to know about it, and that’s why there’s the brilliant countdown showing how much time is left.

The review rating shown gives social proof that others have enjoyed it, and displaying the amount claimed shows that other people are interested in the product too.

4. Authority

Lightning Deals gain a little authority/confidence boost because Amazon has to approve them. There’s a bit of a vetting process (although we’ve found it’s pretty easy to get approved).

Why Does This Matter?

Many sellers just put their items up for sale and hope for the best, or pay for some advertising and call it “marketing,” but that’s not marketing. Marketing is using the principles listed above to help customers act.

We all like putting off decisions. Using the principles above (as Lightning Deals do) helps the customer have what they need to make a decision now.

There are many more principles that Lightning Deals employ.

But just think about how you feel when you get something for a good deal.

You feel great. Smart. Savvy. Even fortunate. These are all great things to have your customers feeling.

Benefit of a Lightning Deal

The benefit of a Lightning Deal is that you can drive a lot of sales.

Why would you want to do that if you have to discount?

Shouldn’t you just wait until all your items sell?

Well, perhaps you’re just starting out and want to gain traction for your new items. Amazon ranks items based on how well they sell. A lightning deal can get your product in front of a lot of people and boost your product’s sales rank.

You can gain more reviews, faster, by selling a lot of inventory in a short amount of time, and that can also benefit your new products.

What You Need for a Lightning Deal

Go to the Advertising tab in Seller Central and select Lightning Deals. As of this writing, your products that qualify are selected by the system, and you need enough in stock. Don’t worry, though: it could be as few as 40 or so units, although it can vary from product to product. The product will need to be Fulfilled by Amazon.

If nothing appears, make sure you have enough product in stock, and that the product has had time to get a good review history.

When we first checked, nothing appeared, and we didn’t revisit the page for a long time, and then lo and behold, we had lots of our products qualifying. So it could have been the system just taking time to update.

A Great Tool, But…

Seller help has more documentation on it, but in terms of results, your results may vary. You don’t get to choose when your Lightning Deal is scheduled. We had one that was scheduled during the wee hours of the morning. Needless to say, it didn’t do very well.

Theory here: we suspect that the size of the discount and how likely the product looks to sell both factor into the scheduling, so take that into consideration. It’s still something that we’re playing around with and hoping for a really good scheduling time.

Don’t Limit Yourself to Lightning Deals. Use the Principles That Make Them Work!

Thing is, you can use the principles of a Lightning Deal to create your own deals that you email to your subscriber list or share on social media.

Take those principles, and use ’em. They work!