Marketplace Briefing: Amazon appears to be sticking to its 2-day format for October Prime Day
This is the latest installment of the Marketplace Briefing, a weekly Modern Retail+ column about the ever-changing e-commerce marketplace landscape. More from the series →
Amazon looks set to stick to its traditional two-day playbook for this year’s fall Prime Day event after testing a longer format in July. The October sale, officially called Prime Big Deal Days, will span two days, according to Amazon Seller Central — which shows the submission and eligibility periods for various promotion deals that sellers can offer — two sources shared with Modern Retail.
Amazon hasn’t officially announced the return of Prime Big Deal Days, but last year the event ran for two days, from Oct. 8 to Oct. 9. In a statement to Modern Retail, an Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the planned format of the October sale, saying, “We haven’t announced the dates of Prime Big Deal Days yet. We’ll circle back as we have news to share.”
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 introduced an October Prime Day in 2022.
By many metrics, this year’s supersized summer Prime Day was a success. Prime Day was “bigger than any previous four-day period that included a Prime Day event,” according to the company. (Amazon did not disclose specific sales or performance data about the sale.) The four-day event helped push overall online spending across all retailers to $24.1 billion, up 30.3% year-over-year, according to Adobe Analytics.
Still, some data suggests Amazon’s Prime Day sales growth was relatively muted despite the longer timeline. Momentum Commerce, a retail consultancy that analyzed $750 million in U.S. Amazon transactions, said spending rose 4.9% during this year’s event. Prime Day’s growth has been stalling since 2021, according to Marketplace Pulse, a data analytics firm, as major retailers launch competing sales of their own.
With tariffs continuing to squeeze margins and Amazon’s fall event historically drawing less traffic than its July counterpart, some sellers expect to scale back discounts, which could make this year’s fall Prime Day more subdued than usual. Sales from Amazon’s October sales event are expected to grow only 8.8% this year, down sharply from last year when revenues rose 32%, according to eMarketer. Tariffs are expected to weigh on holiday spending in general, with retail sales for the 2025 holiday season projected to rise only 1.2%, per eMarketer.
Seller takeaways from July’s four-day event
For Monil Kothari, founder of the New York-based fine jewelry brand Haus of Brilliance, the four-day Prime sale gave him the chance to experiment with his pricing strategy. For example, “Business was so good that I actually cancelled our Lightning Deal for our best-seller last minute, because I saw no reason to give up the margin,” Koathri said. This ended up being the brand’s best Prime Day since 2020, with sales up 160% compared to Prime Day last year.
While his sales fell year-over-year during Prime Day due to tariff-related inventory issues, Chuck Gregorich, founder of outdoor-goods business Net Health Shops, said the longer timeline made things easier for logistics and warehousing by spreading out the workload, which reduced stress on staff and shipping partners.
Others, however, found the extended format less appealing.
Laura Meyer, a former Amazon employee and founder of the marketing firm Envision Horizons, estimated that overall sales across her client portfolio were up about 9% year-over-year from last year’s Prime Day. Despite this, Meyer told Modern Retail in an interview that she prefers the sale’s two-day format for a couple of reasons.
For one, the longer event may have undercut urgency and allowed shoppers to comparison-shop. Indeed, Bloomberg reported that the extended Prime Day gave consumers more opportunities to purchase from Walmart, which ran overlapping promotions. Meyer added that Walmart even extended its sale into the weekend, capturing latecomers Amazon missed.
“People procrastinate, and if you give them a tighter window, they’re going to be faster to act,” she said.
Plus, the retail calendar has become less centered around standard promotional periods like Back Friday and Cyber Monday, as brands embrace longer seasonality and year-round promotions. But the blur of bargains from July 4 until the end of the year is taking a toll on merchants and e-commerce consultants who feel increasingly pressured by deal fatigue, according to Alexandra Carmody, svp of brand strategy at Front Row, an e-commerce accelerator.
“It’s just so much back-to-back. It becomes hard for brands to navigate,” she said.
For that reason, eMarketer’s Sky Canaves isn’t surprised that Amazon is sticking with the two-day format for the October sale.
“The July four-day event was a new experiment for Amazon, and it was successful overall, but a key difference of the holiday season, which this October sale kicks off in earnest, is that it’s much longer,” Canaves said. “The necessity for a longer sale in October may not be warranted at this point.”
Prime Big Deal Days outlook
Kothari said this will likely be the first October Prime Day he sits out since the event launched three years ago. Most of his products are sourced from India, which was just slapped with hefty tariffs. The sudden hit to his bottom line has soured his appetite to offer discounts.
“This is not the year where you operate on a much lower margin just to get volume,” Kothari said. He’s already raised the price on his best-selling diamond tennis bracelet from $349 to $359.
But Kothari’s experience may be somewhat of an anomaly, as 70% of goods on Amazon come from China, according to one estimate from Wedbush Securities. According to Jon Elder, CEO and founder at Black Label Advisor, which advises more than a hundred merchants, the recent 90-day extension of the U.S.-China tariff pause, has improved seller sentiment in the near-term. He’s advising brands to stock up on extra inventory while tariff costs are relatively low.
Even brands still planning to take part are taking a cautious approach. Brandon Fishman, CEO of Prime Team Agency, which works with about 80 brands, said all his clients intend to participate in the October sale, “but the discount rates will be lower because of tariffs in many cases.”
Elder agreed. While all of his clients plan to participate in the October sale, too, the discounts they’ll offer will be “definitely less.”
What I’m reading
- Amazon now offers same-day delivery of perishable foods to Prime members in over 1,000 U.S. cities, expanding to 2,300 by year’s end, the company announced.
- After 15 years as CEO, Poshmark co-founder Manish Chandra is stepping down to take a board role; Namsun Kim, current executive chairman, will become CEO effective October 1.
- Brands are reviving sex‑centric marketing by tapping OnlyFans creators for campaigns, per Business of Fashion.