Why Active Creatures isn’t participating in Amazon Prime Day

octomedia

12th Jul 2016

While some sellers are expecting bumper sales during Amazon Prime Day on July 12, not all of Amazon’s third-party sellers are joining the party.

Aussie e-commerce start-up, Active Creatures, manufactures dance and yoga clothing, which is sold through its website, eBay and Amazon in the US. It also has a reseller network in Australia, Europe and the US and is eyeing a broader retail footprint.

Melody Townsend, who founded Active Creatures with her husband in early 2014, told Internet Retailing that they decided not to participate in Prime Day this year after making the decision not to discount their products.

“Retail is just on sale right now,” Townsend said.

“There’s just so much encouragement to go cheap…we’ve decided we’re not going to do it because it devalues our brand and it takes us down into a category of retail where we just don’t want to play.”

The decision to avoid discounting follows a shift to higher price points across the Active Creatures product range, a move that hasn’t slowed down sales. “We are still selling just as many,” Townsend said.

Positioning Active Creatures as a premium Australian activewear brand in an international market requires a consistent global pricing strategy to gain customer’s trust. Since listing on Amazon, traffic to Active Creature’s website from America has doubled in the last 12 months.

“I think people see us on Amazon, are coming to our website and they are probably trying to work out ‘what’s the brand?’ and ‘what’s the price point?’”.

Consumers comparing prices across multiple online stores means pricing and promotions must be consistent across all channels, including eBay and Amazon.

To avoid the need to discount excess stock, Active Creatures tightly controls its inventory.

“We’ve worked with the factories in China to get our quantities so small that we just don’t need to discount at any time,” Townsend said. “We can just keep maintaining premium price points.

“That’s the direction we are heading in, otherwise we can just see it’s a race to the bottom and we just don’t want to be part of it.”