Just announced in the 042926 Amazon News feed:
It’s official, Prime Day 2026 is in June
https: //sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHS0gyS0Y0WjI1UFBZNFg4
So we’ve got a bit over a month before everyone stops buying, hoping that by waiting a few weeks they’ll get a better deal…
“It doesn’t really look the same from year to year — Amazon changes key categories, lengthens or shortens the duration. From a financial reporting perspective, one thing this does is it allows Amazon to not compare apples to apples [in comparing one year’s Prime Day to another’s]. That helps circumvent some of the tougher questions they might get about Prime Day performance.”
www.retailtouchpoints.com/news/whats-behind-amazons-prime-day-calendar-change/619248
https: //sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHSFNHUU5XMjNRRlRHMjRO
The chum’s in the water; any bets on when Amazon will start calling it Prime Week?
Think this is new… Thought these had to be in prior to the event starting and couldn’t be edited for PD.
All other big deal promos were like this is now.
Good primeday food-for-thought throughout this piece, both about Amazon Sellers and Amazon shoppers…and Amazon itself.
Soooo…how’s it going? What did Day 1 look like for everybody?
It looked like our youngest grandson’s birthday …
Online spending across all retailers in the U.S. hit $8.3 billion on the first day of Amazon.com Inc.’s annual Prime Day sale, according to Adobe Inc., beating the firm’s earlier estimate of $7.9 billion.
“People just don’t have the cash right now,” said William Stern, CEO at U.S.-based small business lender Cardiff. “Prime Day isn’t going to be about buying big TVs or fun stuff this year. It’s for buying toilet paper and garbage bags on sale. Families are literally waiting for these discounts just to buy regular everyday things because their bank accounts are empty.”
(I’ll confess that I did find a good deal on a 2-pack of my preferred deodorant on Amazon yesterday. The cost in my local stores has gone up significantly, and I am not happy about it. So I stocked up!)
Some context for 2025 (and now also 2026)
So…
2015 and 2016 Prime Day
2017 Prime Day + stoppage time (had to add a WC soccer tie in)
2018 Prime Day + stoppage time and shootouts
2019 thru 2024 Prime Day(s)
2025 and 2026 Prime Almost a Week Day
2027 Prime is a Week Day
2028 Prime is a Fortnight Day
2029 Prime is a 3 week Day
2030 Prime is a month Day
2031 Prime is a quarter Day
2032 Prime half a year Day
2033 Prime is a year Day
Amazon HQ after each Prime Day: We’ve just had our best Prime Day ever!
2034+ All Prime All the Time! Constant Hot Sales! Always Fast and Cheap!!
Decent. Within 2% of last year’s first day. But down.
We are not having a good year on Amazon. First year our sales will decline.
We were down 13% to last year.
Bloomberg reporting Amazon was up 9%
A sentiment report came out -16% which sent the stock plummeting on late Tues.
Again, day 1 was great, then it fell off a cliff and the guy who runs our ads (and another large agency), is saying what we saw (big tail off on days 2-4), is what they were seeing across their portfolio.
Maybe this bloomberg report included all the $ Amazon made off of PPC + Sales.
Not sure.
What I do know is we beat rank on our main competitors by an unusually high level, and they were more aggressive than we were.
Sounds like a demand / traffic problem to me in our case.
It’s impossible that Amazon wasn’t honest on their performance, or didn’t bend the numbers for the street. Right? 
Was that based on dollars paid, items sold, or number of transactions, across the (longer) event?
Dollars paid was bound to go up because prices on most things have also increased, over 2025. Even “a deal” is likely a price increase from previous years.
If it was based on transactions or number of items, then I would be curious to know what specific product types were driving that increase. For example, regarding my deodorant purchase above…
…I don’t usually buy that kind of household/hygeine staple online at all and only happened upon that Prime Day deal while looking up something else on Amazon.
Again, just pondering this out…I wonder whether it might even be more productive for Amazon to parse out “Day 1” data, separately from days 2-4, to compare YOY.
Well, maybe not “more productive” for Amazon, but certainly possibly more helpful for the rest of us. Amazon just wants a number for a headline.
We were also down from last year’s numbers by a relatively wide margin, despite our average selling price per unit being significantly higher. I was also surprised to see that Amazon reported an increase of 9% in revenue. Agree with @papy that higher prices in general have probably contributed to this, but yeah, I wouldn’t be surpised if they’re counting other metrics, such as PPC, as well.
Just got this from our SAS manager in the recap of this disastrous event.
“Your conversion rate hit an incredible 98.78% (up +1,179 bps YoY)”
Doesn’t surprise me. Going through the Prime Day orders now. 95% of them were reorders.
Pretty sure it’s time to move on from our Ads guy.