Ask an Expert: How to prepare for Amazon Prime Day 2025

A US-based Amazon seller writes:

Prime Day 2025 is looming and I want to be ready. Last year felt like a scramble, and I know we left sales on the table. This year, I want to be truly prepared, but the sheer volume of advice and changes on Amazon feel overwhelming.

• What are the most common mistakes Amazon sellers make during Prime Day prep that genuinely cost them sales or hurt their account health?
• How can we effectively forecast inventory for Prime Day's massive surge, without ending up with crippling overstock or painful stock-outs afterwards?
• What are the top 2-3 advertising strategies on Amazon that consistently deliver the best ROI during Prime Day, and how early should we start those?
• Beyond just the sales day, what are some key post-Prime Day actions we should take to maintain momentum and avoid the dreaded "sales hangover"?

With less than two months to go until Amazon Prime Day 2025 (the tenth ever), the crunch time to nail your forecasting, order enough inventory and launch your Prime Day ad campaigns is now.

What our customer data says about the potential of Amazon Prime Day 2025

When we analyzed nearly 2,000 Amazon sellers, the impact of Prime Day was indisputable – those who took part experienced a median increase of 70% higher revenue.

And nearly 90% (87.5%) of all Amazon sellers who took part in Prime Day experienced an uptick in growth. These results were particularly stronger for larger merchants, who stand to benefit more from the two-day sales event.

In fact, Prime Day tended to create a median 41% larger revenue boost for Amazon sellers than Black Friday. Two thirds of all Amazon customers gained more revenue on Prime Day than they did from Black Friday.

For those who didn’t take part, 60% experienced a reduction in revenue during the period. Similarly, they experienced a 26% decline per day in new customers.

So, what are the strategies brands should employ for Amazon Prime Day 2025? To find out, we’ll hear from Paul Walsh, founder of eCommerce agency All Things Marketplace, who has over 17 years of experience selling on marketplaces.

Paul has advised a number of top UK and Ireland sellers on Amazon, along with supporting clients to maximize their sales across eBay, Walmart, Wayfair and Zalando.

How should sellers strategize for Amazon Prime Day 2025?

Choose between revenue and margins

Each seller should approach Amazon Prime Day 2025 by asking themselves what is the single biggest priority for their business: Achieving revenue or achieving margin?

If you want to prioritize revenue:

• You should fully participate in the typical template deals which Amazon permits. Do these for as many of your SKUs as possible.
• If the official deal slots don’t cover some of your SKUs or ASINs, still launch coupon offers and some of Amazon’s typical lighter deals on your SKUs.
• This will ensure customers see an SKU as ‘on offer’ as it will display with the full bells and whistles, so that it appears like a deal.

If you want to prioritize margins:

• For sellers who aren’t as focused on the revenue uplift (but would still like it) they should always remember the theory of ‘riding the wave’.
• These sales days are likely to lift many SKUs’ revenue anyway, whether you have a deal running or not – perhaps that lift for two days is enough.
• This means that if you run no deals during this period you may still achieve a 100%-200% lift at your full (non-deal) margin.

My professional advice would be a hybrid blend based on margin per SKU and stock per SKU and an extra discount given to underperforming SKUs – use Amazon Prime Day 2025 as an opportunity to fix them.

What are the most common mistakes sellers should avoid for Amazon Prime Day 2025?

Not allowing enough time for deals and stock

Don’t miss the deal submission window. It’s set for early June (June 2nd according to eComm Catalyst). That’s pretty soon. Also, don’t send stock too late.

You and thousands of others will be slamming Amazon with too much stock from mid-June onwards and they will be struggling to inbound.

If you have a deal confirmed for Amazon Prime Day 2025, depending on the type of deal; some of the rules designate that the price of the deal must be the lowest price for 30 days.

Be careful of this as you may need to taper other promotions down in June to protect July’s confirmed deal zone.

Not increasing your ad spend

People also often forget to adjust their Amazon Ads budget up to account for Prime Day. If your Amazon Ads budget is a sensible percentage of top-line sales (which is a wise strategy), then you will want to increase ads for the deal period.

Set these as a currency value limit, not a percentage, and ensure they’re in line with the increase in sales which you have forecasted.

What’s the key to nailing inventory forecasting ahead of Amazon Prime Day 2025?

Build in your sales buffer to your 12-week stock

I typically don’t get too hung up on the Prime Day period because it’s quite predictable. The first thing we would say is that you should always have 12 weeks of future sales in your Amazon inventory.

If you are heading into a peak, the 12-week coverage should have that baked in. What we mean is that you can’t use a peak to justify having only three weeks of upcoming stock because you are running off a historical 12 week off-peak model.

You need to always map ahead. For example, if you’ve projected a 300% uplift for Amazon Prime Day 2025, then in those two days you will sell eight days’ worth of stock.

So you need to build in a six-day buffer on your 12-week stock number in order to cover the eight days of sales which happen within two days.

What are the top ad strategies sellers should use for Amazon Prime Day 2025?

Be smart with your campaign timings

• Spend correctly and balance this spend throughout the day. Don’t let the Amazon Ads system blow all your budget before most consumers wake up.
• Targeting tactical SKUs and tactical search terms which have strategic value, as a blanket approach will make your ad spend inefficient.
• We would advise spending more on day 1 of Amazon Prime Day 2025 than day 2 but I know other consultants say the reverse.
• We see spending start really picking up around 12-24 hours before Prime Day officially starts. Amazon and customers both start early with some deals and offers and you should too!

What’s an outside-the-box approach you’ve seen that could work for Amazon Prime Day 2025?

I’ve seen a client successfully use a 30-day promotion through June and July or July and August with a strong deal offer. This managed to pick them up the same sales lift as Prime Day as an impact on monthly revenue.

How? Well, a 300% uplift within two days has the same revenue impact as a 20% uplift for the 30-day period as a whole. Would a month-long 10%-off deal increase sales by 20% and match the impact of a 300% uplift over two days. Very possibly!

What are some key actions to take after Amazon Prime Day 2025 to avoid the dreaded "sales hangover"?

Tackle your underperforming SKUs

We would always track a SKU’s performance and where it sits against the rest of the seller’s account. This is really key. The account’s performance most of the time is a blend of many SKUs’ performance collectively.

Some of these are often up and some are often down. We would use the period of Amazon Prime Day 2025 and the period after to try to really lift the poor-performers that used to be good-performers.

As they have proven themselves before, they are likely a good product but they have just fallen off somewhere. Using this period to recover these SKUs, ahead of the normal winter peak can often pay back big time in the period between September and December.

What’s the one thing that you think not many sellers will consider ahead of Amazon Prime Day 2025?

Use last year’s data to benchmark

Using the best evidence available to you (likely your own account last year) install a baseline consideration of what your revenue will be if you do nothing on Prime Day except ride the wave.

All of your uplift metrics should be benchmarked against this comparison and no other period. Because it is unfair to benchmark those two days against a regular July day, as we all know that Amazon Prime Day 2025 will far exceed that.

If you don’t do this, you are always over-reporting your uplift. I used to uplift, but another ten years in this has taught me the importance of the truth and of value-add and margin-add rather than just revenue for revenue’s sake.