Key takeaways:
- Ideas to optimize your landing pages for an easy and delightful user experience
- Best practices to make it easy for shoppers to find your featured products, deals and discounts
- Tips to help enhance your product detail pages to drive sales.
Set up your website
Create a dedicated page with your holiday deals to drive discovery.
Make it easy for shoppers to find your seasonal deals by creating a destination on your website. Similar to branded pages for limited releases and exclusive collaborations, these temporary landing pages can be an effective way to offer a unique, engaging shopping experience for major events like Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
Collection pages group products, typically through a filter, to make it easier for customers to find a specific category or theme. These pages are typically more of a searchable gallery of products that help shoppers find the right product or deal. Once you create your holiday collection, you can link to it from your home page and promote it using a banner throughout your site to make it easy for shoppers to find your holiday deals. Check out how Swell Skateboards promotes its products offering Buy with Prime.
Read about best practices for a Buy with Prime collection page.
If you’re launching your holiday campaign for the first time, well-placed links to your product collection page can help engage shoppers and drive sales.
Identify your feature products
Four tips to help choose the right products for your holiday campaign.
There’s an art to selecting the right products to feature for your holiday campaign. Following these tips can help you get the right products in front of shoppers.
- Prioritize your best-sellers to maximize shopper engagement. Choose from the top 10% of your most purchased products. According to research from the Baymard Institute, 23% of users selected the “Best Sellers” category on sites that had it—often as their first navigational choice from the home page.
- Promote products with 4+ star ratings. Featuring products that have already received high marks from existing customers is another proven tactic to optimize shopper engagement and increase sales. We recommend featuring products with four stars or more. Learn how Reviews from Amazon can help boost brand trust and shopper conversion.
- Offer exclusive products not sold on other channels. An “only available here” approach offers your shoppers something special while making your campaign on your site more distinct.
- Debut a new limited-edition product. Offering a holiday-themed product or a seasonal limited release can make your campaign more exciting and newsworthy.
Learn how Buy with Prime can help you to maximize your product catalog.
Make deals and discounts explicit
Make it clear that your customers can end the year with a cheer.
Once you’ve picked your featured products and started building your holiday collection page or landing page, it’s time to put your promotional strategy in action.
Promote seasonal deals on your home page. Make it easy for shoppers to find your holiday deals by adding a link to your collection page from your home page. Depending on your site’s structure, you can link through a hero image, a top-level navigation menu, or a notification banner. Site optimization specialists at the Baymard Institute note that offering one-click access to a prefiltered list or collection page from your home page can streamline discovery and save shoppers time. It helps ensure that they can easily discover your best deals.
Check for mobile responsiveness. Does your website look as good on mobile as it does on desktop? As of August 2023, 55.5% of global site traffic came from mobile phones. To connect with mobile shoppers, website speed optimization is critical. In a review of conversion data from 20 ecommerce sites, digital marketing agency Portent found that sites that load in one second has a three-times higher conversion rate than sites that take five seconds to load. So as you prepare your site to bring joy to your shoppers this holiday season, be sure your site is optimized for a compelling mobile experience.
Prioritize free shipping in your messaging. Prime is synonymous with free shipping, so promoting “fast, free delivery” as part of your holiday campaign can help you convert more shoppers. According to Digital Commerce 360, 62% of surveyed shoppers said they won’t consider purchasing from a retailer that doesn’t offer free shipping, while another 35% said they prefer it. And, with free shipping becoming more costly for retailers to shoulder on their own, there is a big opportunity to stand out when you can offer free delivery—that’s also fast.
Merchants using Buy with Prime experienced a 25% increase in shopper conversion* by offering fast, free delivery, easy returns, and a checkout experience that millions of shoppers trust.
Learn more about adding Buy with Prime to your site.
Hone your product pages
Improve trust as shoppers browse your products.
There are plenty of ways to take your product page from zero to hero with the right product visuals, messaging, and supporting content. To help you hone your product pages for the holiday shopping season, try these small changes that can have a big impact on your campaign results.
Boost product credibility with the right content. According to research from the Baymard institute, 10% of sites have product descriptions that are insufficient for shoppers, causing merchants to lose the sale. By offering the right information and tools for comparison on your website, shoppers can spend less time hunting across the web for more information and feel more confident in making a purchase while on your site. Baymard calls out three areas of your product description that need to be included to keep shoppers engaged: materials or ingredients, product dimensions, and compatibility information.
Also consider adding user-generated content (UGC) from customers to share “real world” feedback on the value of your products through text, videos, or photos. If available, you could also include embedded influencer or subject matter expert product reviews to further increase the credibility of your products. Learn more about sales drivers including brand credibility and shopper confidence.
Improve shopper confidence with reviews. If you don’t have UGC from customers, reviews are the next best thing. In fact, about half of shoppers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
According to the latest UX best practices from the Baymard Institute, ecommerce businesses should feature a ratings distribution chart within their reviews section by default. This is important because the spread and distribution of ratings can drastically impact a shopper’s interpretation of the reviews. Adding a rating distribution chart can help protect against:
- Shoppers interpreting the reviews as fake if they only see overwhelmingly positive reviews when scrolling through the first page of reviews.
- Shoppers perceiving that the product is poorly rated overall, when primarily negative reviews are listed first.
If shoppers feel there’s a lack of authenticity or only see negative customer feedback, reviews can create an unfounded negative impression of your brand or products. By allowing shoppers to visually assess the distribution of the overall review ratings, you can provide the necessary perspective to ease both the issues of distrust and misinterpreting a product’s actual rating.
If you offer Buy with Prime and sell products on Amazon, you can boost shopper credibility by displaying consumer-trusted Reviews from Amazon on detail pages for products that offer Buy with Prime. Merchants using Reviews from Amazon experienced a 38% increase in shopper conversion, on average.**
Highlight your return policy. Free returns are important to customers. In a PowerReviews’ survey, 87% of consumers said they might stop shopping with a brand that stopped offering free returns. Similar to the Prime returns experience on Amazon.com, Buy with Prime orders are covered by the Amazon Pay A-to-z Guarantee and customers can return eligible purchases for free within 30 days of delivery, giving shoppers confidence in making their purchase. Prime members who check out using Buy with Prime can choose from an expanded number of dropoff locations to return items without boxing up or labeling them.
Offer the Buy with Prime checkout experience. Adding the Buy with Prime button to eligible products signals to shoppers that they can get the seamless checkout and fast, free delivery that they know from Amazon.com directly on your ecommerce site. The Prime transparent delivery estimate is critical for shoppers to understand when they will receive their orders, helping them feel confident about when their orders will arrive and get a head start on holiday joy.
Feature your dazzling holiday deals
Engage cost-conscious shoppers with exclusive discounts.
At one point or another, practically every shopper is interested in deals and promotions, especially cost-conscious shoppers. In fact, 92% of consumers search for a deal before making a purchase. And with long gift lists, saving big is on many shoppers’ minds, so this should be a key consideration as you finalize your marketing strategy. We’ve already discussed the need for a dedicated landing page and walked through which products to feature. Now, let’s get creative with your offers to make the most of your holiday campaign.
Create can’t-miss deals and promotions. Offering exclusive, time-based deals can help drive urgency and interest. Consider the following strategies for your deals:
- Keep it exclusive. Exclusive discounts, such as for Prime members only, can stand out in search and product pages. Buy with Prime verifies that a shopper is a Prime member at checkout, so you can make deals exclusive to Prime members by only offering them through Buy with Prime.
- Offer deep discounts. Deep discounts, typically 20% or more, can be a great way to attract new customers. Create targeted social media promotions that lead with the limited-time deal to get the word out or offer loyal customers a special discount to drive higher-affinity customers back to your site.
- Create deals to inspire cart building. Consider offering deals on complementary or add-on products, or discounts that kick in above a certain dollar amount or item number. Using Buy with Prime cart together with promotions can help you stand out to shoppers and help increase sales. Prime members can add multiple eligible products to their Buy with Prime cart and apply automatic or coupon code promotions, helping them snag great deals on products that offer Buy with Prime, while helping you boost average order value.
For additional inspiration, check out the six tips for running promotions.
*This data point measures the average increase in shoppers who placed an order when Buy with Prime was an available purchase option versus when it was not, during the same time period.
**Data is from a sample of 8 Buy with Prime merchants with average monthly site traffic between 10k and 1M and compares the number of shoppers who placed an order when Reviews from Amazon was present on a product page versus when it was not.