Marketplace Briefing: Amazon skips its usual Prime Big Deal Days recap touting record sales
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 is typically quick to declare victory after its shopping bonanzas.
Last year, it called Prime Big Deal Days “the company’s biggest October shopping event ever.” In 2023, Doug Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores, wrote that the fall sale “outpaced last year’s holiday kickoff event, with more Prime members shopping this year,” adding that customers purchased more than 25 million items on the first day alone.
This year, however, Amazon has been uncharacteristically quiet. Three weeks after its October Prime Big Deal Days, the company has yet to issue a press release or blog post recapping the event — an omission that stands out given how consistently Amazon has used such recaps to tout consumer demand and set the tone for the holiday season.
The unusual silence was flagged in an Oct. 28 research note from William Blair analysts led by Dylan Carden, who described it as “perhaps more damning to some,” pointing out that Amazon had issued post-event press releases in prior years.
Analysts at the firm said the omission could reflect a slower start to the fourth quarter. Wall Street will be closely watching Amazon’s third-quarter earnings call on Thursday for early commentary on how the fourth quarter is shaping up, given that the October event typically serves as a key indicator of holiday demand. “We follow that a softer October Prime event is indeed a bad omen headed into the holiday season, and tracks with our recent consumer sentiment survey that found broad-based and incremental consumer anxiety around inflation, and [a] want to pull back on spending,” the analysts wrote.
The analysts also flagged muted search interest around this year’s event. Google Trends data showed searches for “Prime Day” up just 3% year-over-year, while searches for “Amazon” were down 3% year-over-year during the Oct. 7–8 Prime Big Deal Days period.
It’s unclear why Amazon decided to withhold its post-Prime Big Deal Days recap, as Amazon did not respond to a request for comment by press time. But as Modern Retail previously reported, this Prime Day was complicated by President Donald Trump’s trade war, increasing competition from rival sales, and murky consumer demand amid inflation and economic uncertainty. Any of those factors could have influenced the company’s decision to withhold information about the October Prime Day sale.
The decision may also reflect timing and internal priorities, according to Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData. On Tuesday, Amazon announced plans to eliminate 14,000 jobs, citing a need to reduce bureaucracy and improve efficiency in the era of AI. Business Insider reported that many of the impacted employees in the U.S. were retail managers.
“Given the recent announcement with the job cuts, they probably had behind-the-scenes issues to attend to,” Saunders said. “And because it falls so close to the third-quarter earnings release, they may have decided not to put something out.” He added that the October Prime Day sale isn’t as closely watched as Amazon’s marquee summer event, which the e-commerce giant expanded this year from two days to four.
A missing signal before earnings
Amazon will report third-quarter earnings Thursday afternoon. The quarter does not include the October sales event, but investors will be listening for commentary about early holiday demand and consumer sentiment. Until then, the absence of a post-Prime Big Deal Days recap raises questions about how the October sale truly fared.
“Amazon typically doesn’t provide very much, if anything, in terms of concrete numbers in its post-event press releases,” said Sky Canaves, a retail analyst at eMarketer. “But I do wonder why they wouldn’t at least share good news given that there has been an expectation that they would see a relatively decent year-over-year increase in sales.”
Canaves added that eMarketer recently revised its forecast for Amazon’s October event, lowering projected growth from 8.8% year over year — down sharply from last year’s 32% — to 7.6%, reflecting the sales event’s transition from a new event to a more established one.
Amazon’s fall Prime event, launched in 2022 as an early-holiday promotion, has become a bellwether for fourth-quarter demand while also pulling forward spending before Black Friday. Over 15% of total holiday spending is now expected to occur before November, according to PwC, underscoring the importance of the October sale.
This year’s event delivered gains for several Amazon merchants that previously spoke to Modern Retail. First-day sales were up roughly 33% year-over-year for clients of Avenue7Media, a consulting business that helps sellers grow on online marketplaces like Amazon. Others saw double-digit growth in categories like food and small appliances. Still, the tone among sellers was more cautious. Tariffs, inflation and price sensitivity have forced brands to rely on deeper discounts to drive conversions.
Data from marketing agency PMG underscores that trend. The company found that the week leading up to Prime Big Deal Days saw the sharpest drop in average selling prices on Amazon since the start of 2024. For the week ending Oct. 4, the average selling price of the 1,000 most popular products on Amazon fell 4.7% year over year, to $20.93, the lowest level since the start of 2024. It marked the ninth consecutive week of year-over-year average selling price declines of greater than two percentage points.
Andrew Waber, PMG’s marketing senior lead, told Modern Retail in an email that the decline suggests accelerating price sensitivity among consumers, with shoppers “trading down” and trimming larger holiday budgets. The firm, which manages sales for major brands — including Crocs, Lego and Clorox — also said that discounting varied across categories, with some major brands offering slightly deeper promotions than last year while others pulled back.
Analysts at William Blair expect in-line third-quarter results for Amazon’s North America retail segment, citing full-year operating margins of about 11-11.5%. But the analysts also wrote that headwinds, including tariffs on Chinese goods, could contribute to slower retail sales in the second half of the year, “which could have a knock-on effect to margins.” Still, Amazon’s retail business “should be more resilient than the broader industry given the competitive advantage embedded particularly in Prime’s captive engagement.”
Saunders said that while overall consumer spending has softened, it has not collapsed. “Growth rates have just moderated a little bit,” he said. “Consumers have become a bit more cautious, but there’s nothing that indicates a really serious deterioration.”
Other consumer-facing companies reporting earnings this week have provided mixed clues about spending trends. Online home goods retailer Wayfair posted better-than-expected results, while online marketplace Etsy reported gross merchandise sales that were down year-over-year, reflecting pressure on discretionary categories. VF Corp said sales at its lifestyle brands were uneven, with revenue for North Face and Timberland rising 6% and 7%, respectively, while Vans sales fell 9% from a year earlier.
Saunders said the early results suggest “a little bit of momentum” in consumer spending, despite inflation and tariffs. “People do have some money to spend.”
What I’m reading
- Shopify is the latest — and largest by market capitalization — company to launch its own Substack newsletter. In an Oct. 20 post introducing the publication, titled “In Stock,” Shopify described it as “a weekly dive into the trends shaping commerce and stories from the frontlines of entrepreneurship.”
- Amazon plans to cut about 14,000 corporate jobs as it looks to reduce bureaucracy and prioritize artificial intelligence-driven efficiency gains.
- Live shopping platform Whatnot raised $225 million in its most recent funding round, valuing the company at $11.5 billion, double its worth at the beginning of 2025, per The New York Times.