Prime Day 2025 Playbook: Adapting and Winning Amid New Market Shifts

While brands have been planning for months, Prime Day is fast approaching and remains a pivotal timeframe on Amazon.

With some new changes and macroeconomic variables impacting strategies this year, there are many considerations to factor into your strategy this year:

• The event is expanding from 2 days to 4 days
• Ongoing variability with tariffs and subsequent downstream effects
• Amazon ending Inventory Overage fees starting 7/1/25
• Growing reliance upon ‘deals’ to capture customer attention

In the final lead-up to the event, here are some ways Podean is working with our brands to ensure Prime Day results are maximized:

Remain nimble and have contingencies with inventory 

This year offers augmented challenges with inventory availability, cost/margin sensitivities, consumer behavior, and replenishment times. Amazon has been experiencing receive backlogs for several months, and inventory availability has been sporadic based on tariffs and countries of origin.

While it is likely too late to get the product physically received in time for the event at this point, ensuring coverage through and out of the event to prevent out-of-stock situations remains pivotal. Leveraging FBM, other distributor partners, adjusting your promotional strategy, and reallocating inventory across retailer partners if inventory is trending low or limited will be necessary to ensure a successful event.

Use levers beyond just the core promotion options (Best Deal, Top Deal, etc)

Marquee deals are becoming more strict in costs and eligibility, and as participation scales across the broader brand community, it becomes harder to stand out in the sea of deals during the event. In addition, more retailers and marketplaces are piggybacking off of Prime Day and creating their marquee or micro events leading up to and through Prime Day, causing a higher chance of channel conflict, price matching, and rendering Amazon deals ineligible.

Factoring in other approaches to maximize exposure is ideal to best reach relevant customers. Whether this is leaning more into audience-based promotions (coupons or brand-tailored promotions), off-traffic generation (and using attribution and brand referral bonus/affiliate programs), or running Creator Connections campaigns, expanding your promotional strategy will allow a broader reach and better results.

Refresh and curate creative for priority selection and categories

Content remains a differentiating factor to drive conversion on the platform. Creating a subpage on your Brand Store to curate your focused selection to serve as a landing page for traffic, updating your Brand Story and A+ content to be seasonally relevant and up-sell / cross-sell products, and A/B testing titles or images to find the best performing assets before the event will all help support your Prime Day strategy and augment your media, promotion, and inventory strategies. 

Apply a data-driven approach to your discount approach

After years of running deals for clients through peak events, we’ve seen interesting trends where a higher discount does not necessarily guarantee higher sales or conversion. There is much more nuance across different combinations of discount amount, discount format, competitive landscape, and deal duration that dictate performance.

In a landscape where costs, prices, and margins are much more sensitive, applying in-depth price elasticity analyses and historical benchmarking is pivotal to ensure you preserve an appropriate margin while still driving sales without excessively discounting.

Monitor and react in real time

“Set it and forget it” is never a viable approach with Amazon. Having the right eyes and technology to monitor not only your performance but also that of your competitors is even more important given the longer duration this year to allow you to quickly react and take advantage of situations that arise.

Things like competitors going dark on advertising (allowing you to efficiently conquest their pages/keywords), quickly finding if your deals don’t go live or listings get suppressed (to allow you to escalate or pivot), and tracking competitor products (to see if they are/aren’t on discount or fall OOS) all offer opportunities to react to ensure success.

If you want support or guidance on your Prime Day strategy or beyond, reach out to the experts at Podean!