Back to school time is in full swing, which can only mean one thing: time to start preparing for Q4 and the holiday season! Stay tuned for a webinar on Q4.
We’re excited to start getting our clients ready for the holiday season, but love looking back on July. It was a BIG month with a wildly successful Prime Day, a new webinar from the MPS team, and more industry news and insights than we know what to do with. Let's take a look:
Key Industry Happenings & Platform Updates
Despite a very rocky start with tons of cute, distracting dogs (I mean technical glitches), Prime Day was the biggest shopping event in Amazon’s history, surpassing last year’s Cyber Monday, Black Friday and Prime Day. The Prime Day outage may have cost Amazon close to $100 million, but they were still able to surpass last year’s sales within the first 10 hours. In the MPS office, we are seeing big budget shifts away from promotions like Lightning Deals and more of a focus on advertising and driving off-Amazon traffic to deals. With large amounts of 3P Sellers entering the space and Amazon aggressively showcasing their own PLs, it is crucial for brands to find creative ways to stay relevant and garner long-term benefits from Prime Day. Check out Amazon's Prime Day press release with lots of fun facts!
In another attempt to compete with Amazon, Walmart is boosting its website appeal via lifestyle imagery created by influencers. Learning from Amazon’s failed foray into influencer marketing via their Spark platform, Walmart is working with brands like Bigelow tea and influencers to improve the on-page buying experience by adding product-in-use lifestyle imagery below the fold. Amazon is still light years ahead of Walmart in the world of enhanced content, but this could be a quick way to make a comeback. Read more here.
Snapchat is reportedly hiding a new visual product search feature that, once an item is identified via an object, song, barcode, etc., drives consumers to product results on Amazon. Visual search, let alone voice search, is likely years away from heavy usage, but the partnership between Snapchat and Amazon could expedite consumer adoption. Check out the full Tech Crunch blog.
We aren’t surprised by Amazon’s fastest-growing product categories – grocery, apparel, furniture and health all being fueled by big investments from Amazon in new programs and private label. Check out what else is worth keeping an eye on in 2018.
Great design inspiration we’ve found recently:
A few of our top blogs from the month: