Amazon’s Fall Prime Day was better than expected for some merchants

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Amazon’s recently concluded Fall Prime Day was a surprise hit for sellers.

According to Adobe data, October’s preseason discounts lured shoppers into holiday mode ahead of schedule. During Amazon’s second Prime Day, Oct. 7–8, consumers spent $9.1 billion across US retailers, a jump of 7.3% YoY, and discounts hit 18% off listed prices.

Two Amazon merchants told Retail Brew that consumers are looking for deals and willing to shop earlier rather than wait for November’s traditional sales events. And with shoppers chasing deals, retailers plan to keep the discounts rolling through the holiday season.

“We had a number of clients that exceeded fall Prime Day of 2024,” Katya Constantine, CEO of agency Digishopgirl Media, told Retail Brew. “I will say that we did see deeper discounting this time around. Some brands [were] going as deep as 40% but overall, really strong performance.”

Among Constantine’s clients, sales were up 10%–15% on average, and she had a couple of outliers that were significantly higher in the food and kids categories.

Deal satisfaction for Prime Big Deal Days ran high, with 58% shoppers surveyed reporting that they were very or extremely satisfied with what Amazon served up, according to Numerator data.

“There was a lot of hesitation about how [Prime Day] was going to react, given the situation around us and tariffs and how much costs have gone up,” Phil Masiello, CEO of revenue acceleration agency CrunchGrowth, that helps brands set up stores on Amazon, told Retail Brew.

“I was surprised that we were up as much as we were,” Masiello, whose sales were up “high single digits” among his beauty clients and food brands, added, while there was a 10%–15% growth in brands selling personal care items.

The beauty of it: Talking about beauty specifically, Masiello said, “it wasn’t just selling like a single product and discounting it.” He said his company “made a conscious effort in the beginning of the year to say, ‘If we’re going to go into Prime Day both July and October to offer extreme value…we’re going to have to do discounting, but we also want to make it look like it’s a huge value.’”

“We’ve always done bundles, but we focused on it this year as a way to get around this feeling of, ‘Everything’s so expensive because of the tariffs,’” Masiello added. “We decided to build sets, to focus on gift sets, because you’re getting four or five items in a gift box and some other little things are going with it, so it makes it look like a $300 value for $100.”

Masiello said he did the same thing for clients on the food side that sell specialty food products like olive oils, vinegars, and imported items, and the gifting sets strategy even extended to his clients in the personal care segment.

Zoom out: Amazon’s extended four-day Prime Day (July 8–11), drove $24.1 billion in US e-commerce sales across all retailers—representing a 30.3% YoY growth and greater sales than two Black Fridays, per Adobe data.

Overall, consumer sentiment is indicating that discount season is here to stay. “They’re definitely going to be focused on deals throughout the whole fourth quarter until the holidays,” Masiello said. “You’re going to see more deals, and they’re expecting more deals.”

“The consumer is looking for a good deal, and they’re willing to buy things earlier than waiting for November,” Constantine noted.