As our readers may have heard, Tuesday was a special online sales day. It was Prime Day. This is a day in which the online retailer Amazon offers special discounts to subscribers to its Amazon Prime service. This year was the second year Amazon has held this special sales day.
Now, Amazon itself is not the only party that sells goods on its website. There are also third-party sellers on the site, including a fair number of small businesses.
How did small businesses who sell on Amazon do this Prime Day? It appears that this year’s Prime Day was a pretty good one overall for such businesses. According to estimates from Amazon, by mid-day on Prime Day, sales of goods sold by small businesses on the site were up 30 percent. Also, some small businesses saw particularly large sales increases on the site.
As this illustrates, today’s online world presents all sorts of new potential avenues for small businesses for trying to expand sales, increase their overall exposure and get new customers. So, in today’s world, its online sales and marketing strategy may be a big part of a small business’ overall business strategy.
Of course, the online world can also pose some difficulties for small businesses. One are the costs related to selling or marketing online. Some types of online sales and marketing strategies for companies, such as selling their products on online retail websites like Amazon, can have a fair amount of costs associated with them. So, balancing costs with potential benefits can be a very important step for small businesses to take when determining their online strategy.
Also, branching out into new online sales or marketing tactics can sometimes be a bit of a bumpy process for a small business. In some instances, it leads to a business encountering legal issues it never has before, such as a business dispute unique to the new online sales/marketing method it is using. When such unique issues arise for a small business, it may want guidance from a skilled business attorney on what steps it could take to try to reduce the chances of the issue compromising its overall aims for its online sales/marketing activity.
Source: TheStreet, “Amazon.com's (AMZN) Prime Day Big for Small Businesses,” Giovanni Bruno, July 13, 2016