Best in Thras: More PEAS, Please

Early reporting from Amazon’s Prime Early Access Sale (“PEAS”) is revealing that the products with big sales didn’t come with big price tags. For Thrasio, this meant the event and many of our brands went together like PEAS and carrots, with several of those brands having their best days yet. 

In our new Q&A series “Best in Thras,” we teased out some reflections on PEAS with three questions for three Thrashers whose brands cooked the competition.

In the hot seat: the “brand names”

(L-R) Will Moffett, Nick Warkentin, Brendan Larkin

• Associate Director of Brand Management Will Moffett, whose brand ChomChom™ is making pet owners’ lives less fur-filled with its massively popular pet hair roller. ChomChom was all over big-name media this week, including the front page of the Today Show’s website, Buzzfeed, and The New York Times. It snatched a top spot in Lightning Deals and reached #2 best-seller status in pet supplies.
• Brand Manager Nick Warkentin, who helps light up entertaining fires and the spark in kids’ eyes when Evergreen Products’ Magical Flames™ land in their stockings. The brand is responsible for 136,440 hours of colorful dancing flames keeping customers warm this winter.
• Associate Director of Brand Management Brendan Larkin, who like Nick is lighting up the night – but with GlowCity™ glow-in-the-dark basketballs, footballs, and soccer balls. All three products simultaneously held the #1 best-seller spot during the sale, and the brand absolutely crushed it with sales 1,000% bigger than July’s Prime Day, for its biggest Prime Day yet.

Why was your brand successful during this event?

• Moffett: Choosing an attractive price point for our customers helps a lot. In addition, we were able to obtain a lot of affiliate assistance for external traffic while leveraging coupons.
• Warkentin: We ran three Lightning Deals on the top Magical Flames listings, stacking them with coupons and exclusive discounts for affiliate/influencer partners, to create attractive final price points for our customers across all pack sizes. Additionally, leading into PEAS, we launched 600+ new Amazon PPC campaigns, which drove rank and sessions on key upper funnel keywords.
• Larkin: We leaned into the available Amazon promotions, ran analysis of deals on those promotional prices, and had great discounts at a great time of year. Soccer, football and basketball seasons are all starting, it’s getting darker outside earlier and GlowCity is a great gift for the holidays.

How will you extend and/or learn from that success to have a strong Turkey 5?

• Moffett: We will continue to push for brand recognition off of Amazon by working with affiliates, running Facebook ads, and leveraging TikTok – as well as YouTube soon. By pushing brand recognition we’ve been able to outperform the pet hair remover market and increase market share by 10.02 percent month over month and 19.37 percent year over year. We will continue to push external traffic for conversions and brand recognition while running a Top Deal. We are also making sure we are positioned with enough inventory to sell through November, December, and deals.
• Warkentin: Given the historical “stocking stuffer” appeal for Magical Flames, we will lean heavily into this theme heading into T5 via strategic copy updates, paid traffic campaigns, and affiliate/influencer coverage. Improving brand exposure for Magical Flames on these search terms will enable our Turkey 5 Lightning Deals to reach a larger set of customers. Furthermore, we will look beyond Turkey 5 to continue offering attractive deals up until the Christmas delivery cutoff.
• Larkin: Inventory is not unlimited, so we’ll set specific deal unit limits to maintain healthy inventory throughout Q4. On T5, a deal can really take off, which is great. But you want to make sure you leave inventory to capture higher margin sales from the “halo” effect of deals. On GlowCity, our sales were up nearly 100 percent the week following PEAS compared to the week before.

What piece of advice would you give to sellers coming out of PEAS?

• Moffett: Leverage coupons and price your product to sell during high traffic events. Then ride the algorithm spike wave at a higher price point.
• Warkentin: Do not undersell the power of deal and coupon stacking when trying to improve your deals page placement. Stacked coupons may not be visible on the deals page, but they positively impact conversion, which bodes well with Amazon’s ranking algorithm.
• Larkin: Nothing too extraordinary here; run some final optimization tests over the next few weeks (creative, copy, etc.), work to have strong keyword rank the week leading into T5, and utilize the promotions Amazon offers. Choose the promotions that match the goals for your products – promotions have varying discounts and expected lifts.

Check out more of Thrasio’s big wins during PEAS.