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A seller since 2014, Liran shares his experience on how to hack lightning deals for your amazon fba products. His insights on the algorithm and the best ways to increase your chances and success with lightning deals.
What products work best with Lightning deals?
- More of a general mass appeal product as more customers for them
- Seasonal timing is also important (snow shovel in August may not sell well on a lightning deal)
Avoid certain products
- Spinners cannot be used on Lightning Deals
- Anything with safety issues should not be used
Optimising your time of day
- At night is no good
- Have 2-3 windows open and hit the confirm button one after the other to get the time slot you want
- A decent time for west cost 12:00 and good time for east coast 15:00
- Anytime during day and evening is pretty good
Multiple Lightning Deals
- Is it worth doing one after the other?
- If you have the KEEPA chrome extension – it gives you data on ASINs
- Shows a dot to show when someone runs a lightning deal – Liran noticed a seller had lots of red dots all in the same week.
- If you open multiple windows in the browser and hit ‘confirm, confirm, confirm, confirm’ in those windows you can trick the system and get multiple lightning deals all in the same week.
- It’s one of the only true ‘scarcity’ options you have on Amazon
Scarcity
- Create artificial scarcity in Seller Central
- In Inventory use ‘create a fulfilment order’ and you can put in 240 units and instead of ship to customer click ‘hold inventory for upto 2 weeks’ to reduce the available units
- This how to hack lightning deals tip creates scarcity to show low stock numbers
How to Hack Lightning Deals – scarcity tactics
- Countdown timer is available on a lightning deal
- Minimum units available for the deal is 20 – and when one sells then the % claimed creating scarcity and pushing buyers to get in before it runs out
Lightning Deal Strategy – Sending outside traffic to a lightning deal
- A lightning deal strategy is to choose products that are already getting decent traffic in Amazon
- The better the traffic then the better placement you’ll get on Amazon deals page
- If you have a product that has done well in a lightning deal you are likely to get a better placement
- Another factor is how much traffic you get to the product – this will again get you a better palcement
- ‘Percentage off’ will has to be 20% off your last 30 days and equal your lowest price for the year – giving a higher percentage off will likely get you a better placement
Amazon will select by algorithm whether to give you a lightning deal or not
- how to hack lightning deals can also include where you have a recommended product in the lightning deals dashboard – check the URL and you can change the SKU at the end of the URL to a SKU of a product that doesn’t show on the dashboard – this sometimes works
- Sometimes products get flagged for the wrong reasons – another how to hack lightning deals tip is that you can try and email the lightning deals team to get a product ‘un-flagged’ and passed for a lightning deal (i.e. your wine decanter product is flagged because you mention ‘alcohol’ in your listing but you’re not selling alcohol so the team may pass it)
Benefits of Lightning Deals
- Whenever you can generate a lot of sales on Amazon it’s a good thing
- Sales velocity helps with your organic ranking
- Best way to generate a ton of reviews is to generate a lot of sales
- Even breaking even on the volume will give you boosted ranking and better position in the algorithm
- Improved conversions later on after the lightning deal – so keep stock out of hthe deal to capitalise on the sales after the deal
- Splittly has a ‘profit peak’ tool that takes into account your velocity and raises the price if you have more demand – turn off the tool during the deal
- If you launch a product and start your price really really low – this might hurt your lightning deal pricing as it needs to be 20% off the lowest last 30 days but also lower than your lowest price in the year
- Coupon codes will not be counted into these pricing rules
Clearing stock with lightning deals
- Had a lightning deal on a slow product on prime day and it sold out
- In bullet points put end of seasons limited quantity at this price to justify a lower price but a quality product
- Added listing as a child variation to another product and so the reviews showed up on the other product
Calculating your Cost of Goods and profit margins on giveaways
- Ask yourself – what is my goal with this lightning deal
- To generate rank, reviews, profit, move the product
- Put your price in the FBA calculator (take into account the lightning deal costs)
- Use ‘fetcher.com’ tool to take into account promotions and PPC spend and it emails you your profitability daily
- How many units do you want to make available
October 16th is the deadline to submit deals for Black Friday week or Cyber Monday week
