When the first Prime Day came along last July, skin care product company Proactiv was fairly new to Amazon, having just joined the marketplace the previous February. At that time, the focus was on raising the online profile of the 25 to 30 line extensions outside its core acne prevention product, which was deemed a success.
For 2016, the company plans to promote its best-selling products and ride the massive tsunami of attention and shopping activity the faux shopping holiday has created.
“We’ve shifted our focus to a smaller number of best-selling products, and want to see what that will do,” said Bob Sample, vice president of catalog, retail and etail for Proactiv. “Last year’s goal was more visibility for the line extensions and to improve our rankings.”
Sample said as a brand focused on direct marketing through informercials, mailings and email, Proactive had to be careful not to cannibalize sales that channel through Prime Day and its Amazon presence. “So it was a case of walk before I run,” he said.
Saying Proactiv is “not the kind of product line people are clamoring to find when there’s a big sale,” Sample said Prime Day 2015 was nonetheless a win. “The increased traffic gave us a chance to get in front of a lot of people who were not aware they able to buy our product on Amazon,” he said. “That was the big takeaway last year.”
As Proactive and parent company Guthy-Renker uses mostly a membership-based sales model, Amazon is its first foray into marketplace selling.
“So we’re careful about what we promote and not competing with ourselves,” Sample said. “Now that we have some experience on the platform, we have a better sense of who’s buying what products, and what impact it has on the rest of the business. Now we feel more confident that we’re dealing with different customers on Amazon, and can manage the channel more independently than we did before.”
Mike O’Brien is Senior Editor of Multichannel Merchant