Amazon Prime Day is just around the corner and it is expected to be bigger and better than ever! As an Amazon seller, you know this means one thing: prime yourself now and benefit from the influx of consumers flocking to Amazon getting the best deals of the year.
This year’s four-day mega event is scheduled for June. It is the ultimate online shopping extravaganza dedicated to summer buyers. With over 200 million Prime members, you can leverage these numbers to enhance the success of your business.
As the event inches closer, it is important to make sure that your eCommerce business is well-optimized. Whether you’re new to Amazon or a seasoned merchandiser, our ultimate checklist will help you prepare for the big day and ensure you hit the right targets.
Trellis has helped brands across dozens of categories grow profitably through tentpole events like Prime Day. See how real sellers have used Trellis to increase ad sales, improve margins, and win big on Amazon in our Success Stories.
Key Insights
- Start before the event. Prime Day 2026 is moving to late June. That means FBA inventory deadlines, deal submission windows, and ad ramp-up timelines are all earlier than most sellers expect.
- Prime Day is four days now, plan accordingly. Inventory, budgets, and campaigns need to sustain performance across all four days.
- The halo period matters as much as the event itself. New-to-brand customer acquisition peaks during Prime Day, but retaining those customers happens in the weeks after.
Tips to Make the Most of Amazon Prime Day
Amazon Prime Day 2026 is expected to generate millions in traffic to Amazon. This is an opportunity to grow your organization and ensure that you have maximized the day to help generate sufficient revenue for your company. However, to help with the task here is an Amazon Prime Day checklist.
1. Run always-on advertising campaigns
Over the years, Amazon Prime Day has been much more than the two days when consumers make their purchases. The two-day event asks marketing teams to build awareness and momentum beforehand and to set up their campaigns for effective analysis after the fact. According to a new survey, 75% of shoppers were likely to buy a product on Prime Day that they discovered before the event. Therefore, sellers should concentrate on investing their resources, strategies, skills, and human resources on the actual days. A more holistic approach will enable you to create a formidable campaign strategy to give you an edge over your competitors.
That’s why it’s essential to consider running always-on advertising campaigns before Prime Day. Splitting your campaigns into two different phases will allow you to understand what most customers want to purchase beforehand and to prepare your messaging and keywords in advance.
To prepare even more effectively, automation can go a long way to managing the details while you concentrate on the logistics of the actual days. Automating your advertising campaigns with a platform like Trellis ensures a quick and thorough turnaround on harvesting and evaluating keywords. This process is simple, quick, and well-tested giving you the most up-to-date data on keywords while your competitors attempt to manually harvest theirs a few nights before.
Amazon’s data suggests that brands that advertised during all phases of Prime Day witnessed more than a 2x increase in awareness and consideration compared to brands that did not advertise during any phase of Prime Day. Remember, there’s more to Prime Day than the event itself. That’s why sellers need to advertise before, during, and after the event to augment their brand presence with always-on campaigns.
2. Build your brand presence with custom and creative ads
In a fast-paced Prime Day environment, shoppers searching for the best deals can easily overlook Sponsored Product ads, which resemble organic search results. Sponsored Brands Video ads usually appear halfway down the first page of Amazon search results and are designed to catch attention! Research shows that Sponsored Brand videos win over static ads with higher conversions and click-through rates (CTR).
Using Sponsored Brands Videos when marketing multiple products during Amazon Prime Day has the potential to offer the following benefits:
Engaging customers
Video ads on Amazon have consistently proven to be the best when it comes to capturing the attention of customers. You want to capture the imagination and the attention of most potential customers in the weeks leading to Prime Day. You must build a brand image and story that resonates with your target customers. Sponsored Brands Video ads are better suited to engaging customers than static images and plain text.
Reaching your target niche
Reaching out to your target niche in the Amazon advertising platform is not always easy and you might end up attracting customers who are not interested in your products. Such an approach will make your Amazon ad campaign ineffective. However, video marketing can be a game-changer in reaching your target niche. Through the use of the right mix of branded and generic keywords, you can reach the right target audience and convert them into customers.
3. Analyze shopper insights to retain New-to-Brand customers
Amazon Prime Day probably stands out as one of the best days for new Amazon businesses. These businesses get an opportunity to attract new-to-brand customers who convert into long-term customers.
So how can eCommerce brands find and retain new-to-brand customers? This is where Post-Prime Day shopper insights analysis comes in.
Simply put, reflecting back on your Prime Day performance helps highlight what worked and what failed. This practice allows businesses to evaluate their strategies with the hope of learning from their mistakes and boosting future sales.
While conducting Post-Prime Day analysis, businesses should focus on understanding the effectiveness of their campaigns and whether their PPC ads performed in line with the designated objectives.
We understand, going through spreadsheets of data sounds like a rigorous and daunting task but this is where powerful third-party analytics tools can help streamline your reporting and decision-making.
Analyzing shopper insights
Developing post-event reports using manual approaches might not deliver the most accurate results. It is a challenge for sellers to manually analyze massive data generated during Prime Day. Businesses that undertake manual data analysis struggle to identify critical trends that can inform them about the best approaches to optimize their Amazon brand.
This is where using tools such as Trellis can prove to be effective in handling extensive data while enabling sellers to get accurate information that can allow them to make immediate decisions. Our tool’s automation is directly integrated with our analytics. This means that our algorithm takes this information and makes it actionable in many of the same ways that advertisers try to do it manually. Yet, Trellis does it quicker and more reliably as we pivot as soon as the algorithm’s tests reach statistical significance.
Powerful automation platforms such as Trellis go one step further by mapping your keywords against different buying behavior. This enables sellers to make full-funnel marketing decisions without digging through their data and manually attributing behaviors to certain events. A platform like Trellis makes it easier to balance bidding on generic terms (to get more new-to-brand customers), long tail keywords (high-intent customers) and branded terms (to encourage repeat business).
The key to Prime Day success is to not only prepare before and on the day of but to keep the momentum going. According to Amazon, 82% of shoppers are likely to find out about a new brand on Prime Day. Analyzing shopping behavior post-Prime Day can uncover insights for curating shopping experiences for these new-to-brand customers and setting retargeting campaigns that promote repeat shopper insights.
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How Trellis Can Help With Prime Day Advertising
Prime Day is one of the most competitive advertising environments on Amazon. Budgets spike, click-through rates shift, and the sellers who win are the ones who prepared weeks in advance.
Trellis’ AI-powered advertising automation does the heavy lifting so you do not have to manually manage bids across hundreds of campaigns during the event. The platform continuously harvests and evaluates keywords, adjusts bids based on real-time performance, and scales your campaigns up and down as traffic fluctuates across all four days.
With Trellis’ Dynamic Pricing, you can also protect your Buy Box automatically. The platform reacts to competitor pricing changes in real time, helping you stay competitive without sacrificing your margins.
After Prime Day, Trellis’ Shopper Insights give you a clear picture of who bought from you, which keywords drove new-to-brand customers, and how to retarget those shoppers to drive repeat purchases. You do not need to dig through spreadsheets to find those answers.
Trellis also supports promotion tracking, so you can measure the real impact of your Prime Day deals on overall profitability, not just top-line sales.
If you want to go into Prime Day with a strategy that is built on data and runs on automation, book a demo with the Trellis team today.
Inventory Planning and FBA Deadlines
Most sellers think about advertising first when Prime Day comes up. Inventory planning is just as important, and the consequences of getting it wrong are immediate. Running out of stock mid-event stops your ads from serving, tanks your organic rank, and sends shoppers straight to your competitors. That rank can take weeks to recover.
Prime Day 2026 is moving to late June, which means every deadline is earlier than you’re used to. The timelines you used last year no longer apply. Here’s where your inventory should be based on 2025 patterns:
- FBA minimal shipment splits: aim to arrive by mid-May
- FBA Amazon-optimized splits: aim to arrive by late May (more complex to set up, but gives you extra time)
- Amazon Warehousing and Distribution (AWD): aim to arrive by late April. AWD auto-replenishes your FBA stock as it depletes, which is a significant buffer against mid-event stockouts.
If you are still creating your shipment plan in late April or early May for a late June event, you are not early. You are on time at best.
When it comes to forecasting how many units to send in, start with your Prime Day 2025 sales data. If you did not participate last year, use your highest-velocity week from Q3 2025 as a baseline. Prime Day 2025 ran for four days, and total sales were up 30% year over year. Daily pacing was lower than in prior two-day events because demand spread across four days. Plan for sustained velocity across all four days, not a single spike on Day 1.
For your hero SKUs (your top three to five sellers), build your forecast around:
- Four full days of elevated sell-through
- A 20 to 30% sales halo in the week after the event closes
- Safety stock so you stay in stock through Day 4
Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM) can work as a backup for oversized items or SKUs with unpredictable demand, but understand the tradeoff. FBM listings lose the Prime badge and Buy Box preference. For most sellers and most products, Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) is the right path for Prime Day.
Deal Types and Submission Windows
Here is something a lot of sellers learn the hard way. Deal submission windows close weeks before Prime Day. If you wait for Amazon to officially confirm the event dates before you act, you may already be locked out of Lightning Deals and Best Deals entirely.
Based on 2025 timelines, Lightning Deal and Best Deal windows close roughly six to eight weeks before the event. With a late June Prime Day, that window likely closed in early May. Check Seller Central now to see what is still available.
Here is a breakdown of the four main deal types:
Lightning Deals
- Time-limited (4 to 6 hours) and high-visibility on the Amazon Deals page
- Cost $150 to $500 per deal
- Best for driving a short burst of traffic or moving inventory quickly
- Require a minimum 3.5-star rating and sales history to be eligible
Best Deals
- Run for the full event duration with similar Deals page placement
- Higher fee than Lightning
- Deals but more sustained exposure
- Best for hero SKUs you want visible across all four days
Prime-Exclusive Discounts
- No per-deal fee and earn the “Prime Day Deal” badge
- Available to Prime members only
- The best fallback if you missed the Lightning Deal or Best Deal window
- Submission deadlines are typically later than Lightning Deals
Coupons
- Display on search results and product pages, not the Deals page
- Later submission deadlines than any other deal type
- Can be stacked with Prime-Exclusive Discounts to hit a deeper discount without paying per-deal fees
- Best option if you missed every other window
Buy Box Strategy During Prime Day
The Buy Box accounts for over 80% of Amazon sales. During Prime Day, the competition for it gets more aggressive.
Competitors lower prices, adjust fulfillment strategies, and bid on your branded keywords. Losing the Buy Box on your best SKU during peak traffic is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make during Prime Day.
Your Buy Box eligibility comes down to a handful of factors:
- Competitive pricing relative to other sellers on the same Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN)
- Fulfillment method (FBA gives you a strong advantage over FBM sellers)
- Seller rating and feedback score
- In-stock rate
- Shipping speed
The problem with Prime Day is that manually monitoring and adjusting your pricing across hundreds of SKUs during a four-day event is not realistic. A competitor changes their price. Your Buy Box share drops. By the time you notice, you have lost hours of peak traffic.
Automated Dynamic Pricing solves this. The right repricing tool reacts to competitor price changes in real time and adjusts your price gradually to stay competitive. Gradually is the key word here. Aggressive price drops can trigger a race to the bottom, hurt your margins, and in some cases violate Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policies. Good dynamic pricing automation stays within your defined guardrails
During the event, check these metrics on your hero SKUs at least twice per day:
- Buy Box win percentage per ASIN
- Competitor pricing on your top products
- Inventory levels, because going out of stock immediately loses the Buy Box
If you lose the Buy Box on a key product, investigate the cause right away. Is it pricing? Fulfillment method? A competitor offering faster shipping? The faster you identify the issue, the faster you can fix it.
In Summary
As an Amazon seller, your ultimate goal is to make the most of Prime Day 2026. This is an opportunity to attract new customers and convert them into repeat customers, which will enhance your reputation and increase your sales in the future.
That’s why you need to automate your advertising campaigns for Prime Day and focus on meeting your customers’ expectations without distraction. With Trellis’ intelligent Amazon Advertising software, you’ll leverage the power of an AI-driven automation and analytics software that will optimize your Amazon campaigns in seconds. Our software handles all your advertising needs as you focus on what matters most – serving your customers.
Book a demo today and get an Amazon advertising software to increase your sales just in time for Prime Day!