Amazon is making Prime Day a four-day event in 2025
Amazon is extending its marquee summer sales event to four days this year, marking the longest Prime Day in company history, according to an internal memo to third-party sellers obtained by Modern Retail.
“For 2025, we decided two days just wasn’t long enough,” according to a message from the Amazon Services team to the e-commerce giant’s independent sellers, who account for 60% of sales on Amazon. The exact dates were not disclosed, but last year’s sale ran from July 16 to July 17.
The move follows Amazon’s record-breaking Prime Day in 2024, when U.S. shoppers spent $14.2 billion online during the 48-hour sales bonanza, according to Adobe Analytics. Amazon also described last year’s Prime Day as the “biggest Prime Day shopping event ever” in a press release at the time.
The extended timeline “will allow more customers even more time to shop and discover millions of deals,” according to the memo. But it also represents a strategic counter to the increasingly crowded summer sales season. Major retailers including Walmart and Target, as well as upstarts like Temu, have launched competing summer sales events to capitalize on Prime Day’s consumer momentum, effectively turning the entire month into a nonstop promotional blitz.
This year, sellers can offer a range of Prime-exclusive promotions, including Best Deals, Lightning Deals, Prime Member Coupons and Price Discounts, with varying minimum discounts. Deeper deals of 40% or more will receive expanded placement across Amazon’s site, increasing their visibility to shoppers, the memo said.
Amazon declined to comment.
The rise of Prime Day
Launched in 2015, Prime Day started out as a way to boost Amazon’s $139-per-year membership program, which grants subscribers access to fast shipping and exclusive discounts. The event was so popular that Amazon expanded the summer sale into a two-day affair. Amazon added an October edition of Prime Day in 2022 to extend the shopping frenzy.
The expansion signals Amazon’s intent to reclaim attention in a hyper-competitive retail landscape. Though Prime Day remains a dominant force in e-commerce, rivals have grown more competitive with overlapping “deal weeks,” pulling focus — and dollars — away from Amazon’s platform. A four-day window could give Amazon sellers more chances to break through the noise and drive sales.
About 189 million people in the U.S. had a Prime subscription as of September, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. That’s up 9% from the year before and the highest estimate ever since CIRP started tracking Prime memberships in 2013.