Performance During Amazon’s Big Style Sale

Last Monday, June 22, a pink banner appeared on Amazon.com directing to their Fashion Sales and Deals page. The rumored Amazon Big Style Sale was finally taking place. Generous discounts on jeans, handbags, Amazon brand apparel, and more were all listed on this landing page. The Big Style Sale ran from June 22 to June 28, 2020.

Now, this sales event has come and gone, and advertisers are reviewing performance. Did this event bring in major revenue and impression increases? Or did its ambiguity lead to lackluster returns?

The ROI Revolution Marketplaces team has several apparel clients who participated in the Big Style Sale. Here, we’ll provide an overview of the organic and advertising performance the ROI Revolution portfolio experienced during the event.

Although each client participated in the sale differently, with some running deals all week and others doing Deals of the Day, the ROI team did notice some across the board trends.

Impressions

During an online sales event, one might expect impression volume to increase. If $100 of ad spend normally gets you 100,000 impressions, a sales event might boost that up to 150,000 or 200,000. However, we did not see this phenomenon with the Big Style Sale.

The ROI team observed impression volume increase proportionally to ad spend. If the account managers increased spend 200%, impressions also went up by about 200%. There were some cases however where impression volume did not have this relationship to spend, but instead rose by a lower percentage.

These inconsistencies are certainly a surprise, and lead to questions about Amazon.com’s traffic increase during the sales event.

Although there wasn’t a steep ad impression boost, organic impressions did see a small lift. Some of our apparel clients saw organic impressions increase up to 150%.

This is great for apparel and accessories! The story is not the same for other industries, however. The ROI team noticed organic glance views for other brands actually go down slightly week over week.

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Revenue & Orders

Similar to impressions, the ROI team did not notice a drastic ad revenue increase during the Big Style Sale. Ad revenue either went up proportionally to spend, or did not go up as much as expected.

What the team did notice is an increase in orders. Although revenue did not spike, orders did. In some cases, orders were 50-100% higher than the expected return due to increased investment.

This could be attributed to the lower average order value, given all the discounted products. The good news is that this increase in orders came with high New To Brand metrics, and hopefully valuable new lifetime customers.

On the organic side, clients are reporting a substantial increase in revenue. This could give us insights into user behavior during the Big Style Sale. We can hypothesize from this phenomenon that users were focused on the Deals page, and went straight to product detail pages and checkout from there. This leaves no room for searching and clicking on ads, but ample room for quick purchasing.

Amazon Stores

To complement the Big Style Sale, the ROI team added new pages to our clients’ Amazon Store to showcase the items on deal. For conversions from the Amazon Store specifically, the ROI team saw mixed results. Some clients actually saw decreased sales week over week during the event, while others saw small lifts under 20%.

Similarly, Store visitor volume remained stagnant week over week. Orders also did not see a large change, but some clients saw a small uptick in the number of orders made from the Store.

It’s possible more sales will be attributed in the coming days, but it’s also possible that shoppers were not interested in browsing as much as taking advantage of the discounts as fast as possible. The lack of change in visitor and sales volume supports the idea that customers bypassed Stores completely and checked out right from the product detail pages or Deals page.

Amazon Big Style Sale 2021?

When this sale was first leaked to the press, it seemed like a mini Prime Day. The lack of promotion and clarity around it from Amazon left us on the edge of our seat. We were eager to see how this event would play out, or if it would even take place at all. Now that it’s over, we’re excited to see if the Big Style Sale will take place in 2021.

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