This blog was updated on April 17, 2025.
Amazon Prime Day 2025 will be the longest and most complex Prime event to date. For the first time, the shopping holiday will span four full days. With that extra runway comes higher stakes, new fees, and tougher competition.
To match the extended event, Amazon is also revamping its Deals and Promotions fee structure, shifting from flat fees to performance-based models. This means tighter margins, steeper upfront investments, and a greater need for precision in what gets promoted.
Here is a snapshot of what’s changing:
- Price Discounts (formerly Prime Exclusive Discounts) now cost $100 per ASIN during Prime Day
- Lightning and Best Deals remain at $500 and $1,000, respectively
- Non-peak Deal Fees (effective June 2, 2025) drop to $70/day + 1% of deal sales (capped at $2,000)
- Coupons now carry a $5 base fee per ASIN + 2.5% of coupon sales
In this updated guide, we’ll walk you through:
- Which promotional levers are still worth it (and which aren’t)
- How to plan for profitability with Amazon’s new variable fees
- What it takes to compete on a 4-day Prime Day
- Post-event strategies to extend your Prime Day ROI
- How to forecast inventory with precision using historical and projected lift
- What retail readiness looks like in 2025 (and why it’s non-negotiable)
- The ad strategy mix proven to perform before, during, and after Prime Day
- Ways to leverage your owned channels to boost deal performance and organic rank
Should Your Brand Invest in Prime Day?
Before we get into the tactical details, let’s address a strategic question that not enough brands ask: is Prime Day worth it? On the surface, the answer seems obvious. Prime Day remains one of the biggest online shopping events globally.
In 2024, Prime Day generated $14.4 billion in global revenue, an 11% increase from the year prior. Independent sellers accounted for more than 200 million units sold. Many of these brands outperformed Amazon’s own retail division in growth rate.
With Prime Day 2025 expanding to four days, all signs point to this year’s event breaking records once again. Naturally, anyone selling on Amazon feels the pressure to participate. Who would want to sit out an event expected to exceed $15 billion in revenue?
But the truth is, there’s more to consider than just top-line volume.
Understanding the Risks
- Competition
Prime Day has become intensely competitive. Some of the most recognizable brands in the world are investing heavily, and they have the ad budgets to match. If you plan to compete, be prepared to raise your bids or risk being buried in the noise. - High Fees and Low Margins
Success on Prime Day comes at a cost. Between Amazon’s new performance-based promo fees, elevated CPCs, and higher inventory and fulfillment expenses, your margins can disappear quickly if you don’t plan carefully.
- Overstocking and Underselling
Forecasting inventory is its own challenge. If you overestimate demand and sales don’t materialize, you could be left holding excess stock and paying storage fees. On the flip side, understocking could mean losing out on momentum, sales, and even rank.
So, Should You Participate?
If you sell on Amazon, then yes. You should take part in Prime Day. But how you participate matters. There is a major difference between passively running a few low-effort Coupons, and strategically investing in ad-supported, retail-ready ASINs with a full-funnel plan.
Smaller brands can compete with the heavyweights. But doing so requires more than just a good deal. It involves retail readiness, promotional precision, and a strong advertising foundation.
When it comes to Prime Day 2025, go big or go strategic. Anything in the middle will likely get lost.
💡 PRO TIP: Participation is not the same as investment. Brands with strong margin structure, clear goals, and scalable ad budgets are positioned to win. Everyone else risks paying premium prices for mediocre returns.
How to Optimize for Prime Day Conversions
The first step in any successful Prime Day strategy is ensuring your product detail pages are fully optimized. While it may seem basic, retail readiness remains one of the most overlooked opportunities for conversion on Amazon.
When a product is considered retail ready, it means the listing includes everything a shopper needs to make a confident purchase decision. Before Prime Day, carefully review your entire Amazon catalog—especially the ASINs you plan to promote. It makes no sense to advertise products that aren’t built to convert.
Focus on the fundamentals:
- Include the most relevant and high-converting keywords in your product titles
- Use all available bullet points with clear benefit statements and secondary keywords
- Upload high-resolution images that showcase product use, packaging, and differentiation
- Add a product video to enhance engagement and time on page
- Make sure A+ Content is current, visually engaging, and brand-aligned
- Implement Amazon’s Brand Story feature to reinforce brand identity and trust
💡 PRO TIP: Retail readiness is step one. If your product pages aren’t ready to convert, no promotion or ad campaign will save your Prime Day performance.
Learn more about how to make your Amazon product listings retail ready.
How to Promote Your Products During Prime Day
Prime Day isn’t just about pushing volume anymore. With rising fees and a longer event window, your promotional strategy needs to be as calculated as your ad spend. Every promotion type, from Price Discounts to Lightning Deals, comes with trade-offs.
Success in 2025 will depend on selecting the right products, aligning your promo mix with business goals, and using badging to stand out in a crowded marketplace. The brands that win will be the ones that treat promotions as a performance tool, not a checkbox.
- Price Discounts (formerly Prime Exclusive Discounts) are still one of the most accessible and effective ways to participate in Prime Day. They apply only to Prime members and display a strikethrough price, savings summary, and deal badge. While they were previously free to run, Amazon has increased the Prime Day fee to $100 per ASIN. These work best for high-margin products with strong conversion rates, especially bestsellers that benefit from Prime Day visibility.
- Lightning Deals are short-duration promos with limited inventory, usually lasting six hours. They feature a countdown ticker and are promoted across Amazon’s high-traffic deal pages. The Prime Day fee remains $500, while non-peak fees (effective June 2, 2025) drop to $70 per day plus 1% of deal sales, capped at $2,000. These are ideal for urgency-driven categories and time-sensitive offers.
- Coupons now come with a new structure: a $5 fee per ASIN plus 2.5% of sales. While they appear with a green badge, they do not qualify for Prime Day badging, limiting their visibility during the event. Coupons work well for Subscribe & Save items or targeted promotions where badging is not essential.
- Best Deals can run up to 14 days and provide top placement on Amazon’s Deals page with a red “Best Deal” badge. Prime Day Best Deals still cost $1,000, while non-peak pricing mirrors Lightning Deals. Best Deals are best for longer campaigns, hero products with strong reviews, and items with high LTV.
PRO TIP: Channel Key recommends using Sponsored Products to help drive traffic to these listings. If customers can’t find your promotions, you won’t generate sales. Raising your bids and/or daily budgets for ad campaigns that drive traffic to your deals is a powerful way to boost sales during Amazon. View our Best Prime Day Marketing Strategy for Sponsored Products further down in this blog.
How to Forecast Your Prime Day Inventory
With Prime Day expanding to four full days, inventory forecasting is more important (and complex) than ever. This isn’t just about supporting a sales spike. It’s about protecting profitability across a longer window while avoiding costly overstock penalties or stockouts.
- Start with your promotion plan. You can’t forecast inventory without knowing which ASINs you’ll promote. Amazon’s new performance-based promo fees make it even more important to prioritize high-converting, high-margin products.
- Factor in the 4-day window. Use historical data to understand your typical Prime Day lift, then adjust for extended duration, promotional depth, increased ad spend, and any non-peak testing you plan to run.
- Keep an eye on FBA fees. Overstocking can trigger excess storage charges while understocking can hurt Buy Box share. Ship early and align inventory shipments with your deal dates and durations to avoid delays.
- Leverage your past Prime Day data as a benchmark. Look at year-over-year sales spikes by ASIN, performance relative to your ad spend, and Halo Effect sales. Adjust inventory forecasting to reflect your Prime Day advertising budget and expected traffic sources.
💡 PRO TIP: The best inventory plans are built after the ad budget is set. If you plan to triple your daily ad spend and run high-visibility promotions, expect a 2x to 4x sales lift on key ASINs. Forecast aggressively for your best performers, not your full catalog.
How (and Why) to Optimize Your Brand Store for Prime Day
Every brand on Amazon should have a Brand Store. This is a dedicated space on Amazon to introduce new products, showcase bestsellers, and even provide personalized recommendations for customers. Think of it as your brand’s Amazon real estate. It’s essentially a mini website for your business. You even get your own Amazon.com web address to use in marketing campaigns (amazon.com/yourbrand).
Having a Brand Store is particularly helpful during big events like Prime Day. When shoppers visit your Brand Store, they see only your products. Unlike product detail pages, your competitors can’t advertise in your Brand Store.
Naturally, you should curate your Brand Store to feature your Prime Day offers and promotions right at the top. This allows customers to see all your best offers at once, which can result in more sales.
You can drive traffic to your Store from your brand website, social media channels, or sponsored advertising—both on and off Amazon. If you promote your Store through external marketing activities, you can even add a tag to the URL to analyze traffic sources.
💡 PRO TIP: If you’re running several deals during Prime Day, Channel Key recommends setting up a deals page in your Store and driving traffic to that page with Sponsored Brands.
Learn more about how to create and optimize your Amazon Brand Storefront.
Using External Marketing to Drive Traffic to Your Listings During Prime Day
This strategy might seem like a no-brainer, but most brands don’t take advantage of it, resulting in missed sales.
In addition to your on-Amazon marketing efforts, use every weapon in your arsenal to drive external traffic to your Store and product listings. Let your customers know in advance about the amazing deals you’ll offer during Prime Day.
Amazon prohibits Prime Day messaging in ads running on Amazon, but you can use it on ads that run off the platform if they include an official Prime Day deal linking back to Amazon. Tease your upcoming Prime Day deals on your website, email marketing, and social media channels. The more external traffic you drive to your Prime Day offers, the more sales you will generate.
💡 PRO TIP: External traffic isn’t just bonus exposure. It can directly impact organic rank and deal performance. Brands that leverage email and social effectively tend to outperform those relying on Amazon Ads alone.
Get Your Amazon Small Business Badge(s)
Anything you can do to distinguish your product listings will help drive sales during Prime Day. One of the most overlooked opportunities is applying for Amazon’s business certification badges, which serve as visual indicators that your brand qualifies for specific programs or recognition.
The Small Business Badge is a great example. This icon appears on your listings and signals to customers that they are supporting an independent brand. If your company employs fewer than 100 people and generates under $50 million in annual revenue, you are eligible to apply. The application is free and typically takes about 10 days. While the badge itself will not change your business, it can help your products appear in special merchandising placements and Prime Day promotions.
Amazon is also offers a Black-owned Business Badge, which identifies certified Black-owned brands in search results and on product detail pages. To qualify, sellers must provide valid documentation confirming their minority-owned business status.
In addition to these programs, Amazon offers several other business certifications, including women-owned, veteran-owned, and climate pledge friendly designations. These badges can help boost visibility, expand reach, and qualify your brand for additional promotions throughout the year.
Explore the full list of available business certifications on Amazon Seller Central
The Essential 3-Phase Prime Day Advertising Strategy
Once you know what products you will promote, it’s time to execute the three-phase advertising strategy designed to maximize traffic and conversions during each phase of Prime Day. This is a general approach that Amazon recommends for all brands offering deals and promotions.
- Phase One: Promote Your Deals & Brand to Customers Researching Products
The lead-up to Prime Day is the time to highlight the value of your promoted products and brand to customers who are actively researching products. This will help make your promoted products and deals even more discoverable and increase conversions on event day. You can also use this time to optimize your campaign inputs, such as audiences and keyword strategies, so your campaigns are running at maximum performance on Prime Day. - Phase Two: Convert Brand-Aware Shoppers Who Are Ready to Purchase
Customers are ready to purchase on Prime Day because they know the event doesn’t last long. This is the time to utilize additional marketing levers to help maximize conversions among audiences that have already seen your ads. For example, you can remarket to audiences that visited your product detail pages before Prime Day to stay top of mind on the day of the event. - Phase Three: Re-Engage Your Audiences at Scale to Maximize Sales
Brands often enjoy a “halo effect” after Prime Day ends. According to Adobe Digital Insights, retailers experienced up to a 50% increase in sales in the days following previous Prime Day events. To maximize sales during this time, promote complementary products to your existing audiences or reach new audiences who did not buy your products during Prime Day through retargeting.
The Best Sponsored Products Strategy for Prime Day
A strong advertising strategy incorporates all of Amazon’s advertising levers. For most brands, Amazon recommends the following mix: 70% Sponsored Products, 20% Sponsored Brands, and 10% Sponsored Display advertising.
The reason Sponsored Products take up the bulk of your ad budget is because they drive the most sales. After all, these are sponsored product listings that show up in the Amazon search results. According to Feed Advisor, 70% of Prime Day sales come from Sponsored Products.
The following tips will help you create and run Sponsored Products that drive traffic to your Prime Day promotions before, during, and after Prime Day.
Before Prime Day
Start advertising the products you plan to promote during Prime Day a couple of weeks early, but save the discounts for the sale. According to Amazon surveys, 75% of shoppers are very likely to buy a product during Prime Day that they have already discovered in the lead-up to the event.
If they’ve seen your product several times by the time Prime Day arrives, your deal will make it much easier to convert them. Also, advertising campaigns need at least 2 weeks to collect enough data for PPC optimization. Starting your Sponsored Products campaigns early will make it easier to fine-tune them during Prime Day.
Consider these recommendations before you launch your Sponsored Products campaign this Prime Day:
- Know What Products to Advertise
Create Sponsored Products campaigns for every product you plan to promote during Prime Day with a Prime Exclusive Discount, Top Deal, Best Deal, Lightning Deal, or Coupon. - Prepare Your Budget
Advertising during Prime Day can be expensive. More competition means higher CPCs. To ensure your products receive ideal placement, Channel Key recommends doubling your daily ad budget for Prime Day. You should also increase bids against your top-performing keywords and targets by at least 15% during Prime Day. Ensure your campaigns have enough budget to keep running so you can engage customers throughout the entire event. - Choose How to Allocate Your Budget in Your Bidding Strategy
You only pay when customers click your ad, and you decide how much you’re willing to pay. This is your bid. For Prime Day, set your bids to the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for a click. You can always lower your bids any time. When you create a Sponsored Products campaign, you can choose from three bidding strategies: dynamic bids (down only; up and down), fixed bids, and rule-based bidding. Pick the strategy that works best for your campaign’s objective.For Prime Day, take advantage of the dynamic up-and-down bidding feature where Amazon Ads can adjust your bid (by a maximum of 100%) when it is more or less likely to lead to a sale. Dynamic bidding can also reduce your bids for impressions that are less likely to convert to a sale, which can reduce spend on less impactful placements while focusing on quality clicks. - Select your targeting and add keywords
Select your targeting and add your top keywords and products to show your ads on shopping results and detail pages to relevant shoppers. You can use automatic campaigns or manual campaigns, which you can choose to target keywords or products.In the weeks leading up to Prime Day, optimize your keyword match type strategy by monitoring your campaign for high-performing keywords. Ensure you’re serving on your most relevant queries by reviewing impression share for them. If impression share is low, now is the time to get aggressive on them before everyone else raises their bids.
💡 PRO TIP: Channel Key recommends both a defensive and offensive bidding strategy for Sponsored Products campaigns. The defensive strategy involves bidding on your branded product keywords to ensure your products appear at the top of the search results when shoppers look for your deals. Conversely, you may want to bid on your competitors’ keywords to siphon customers from their search traffic.
During Prime Day
Use the following tips to monitor the performance of your campaigns with Prime Day shoppers:
- Review Your Bids and Budgets
If your active campaigns are going out of budget, try adjusting bids or your budget upwards. When your campaigns go out of budget during the day, your ads will be paused until midnight of the next day, and you could lose impressions and sales.
- Know Your Top-Selling Products
Not all your Sponsored Products campaigns will perform the same. By the end of Day 1, adjust your budget to increase exposure for the products that are selling the most.
- Don’t Measure Your ROAS Right Away
Hold off on measuring success based on ROAS. Sponsored Products ads have an attribution window of 7 days. This means purchases made by customers up to a week after clicking on your ads could be accounted for in your sales attributed to advertising. Amazon recommends waiting at least this long to review your campaigns in full.
How to Harness the Prime Day Halo Effect in 2025
Prime Day is not just a four-day event—it’s a launchpad. Many brands see a sales lift for up to two weeks after Prime Day, especially those that invest in post-event marketing.
Start with retargeting. Use Sponsored Display and DSP to reach shoppers who browsed but didn’t purchase. Serve ads for accessories, bundles, or related products. Brand Tailored Promotions can re-engage specific audiences with personalized deals.
Keep your bestsellers in motion. If a Prime Day ASIN performed well, keep advertising it post-event to maintain organic momentum. Consider email and social campaigns to drive owned traffic back to Amazon, especially to complementary or restock products.
Finally, segment your audience. Follow up with customers who purchased with suggestions for what to buy next. Email campaigns, custom ads, and retargeting help extend the value of every Prime Day transaction.
Learn more about how to create Brand Tailored Promotions for cart abandoners.
Channel Key Takeaway: Prime Day 2025
Prime Day 2025 brings more complexity, more competition, and higher costs than any year before. With rising fees, evolving deal structures, and a four-day event window, this is not the time to participate blindly. Success this year requires strategic investment in what actually drives profitability. Not just sales volume.
Established brands that focus on fewer, better promotions, retail-ready listings with margin to support performance-based fees, ad strategies that span discovery and re-engagement, and smart use of owned traffic will not only win Prime Day. They’ll turn it into a long-term growth engine.
At Channel Key, we help brands do exactly that. Whether you’re revising your Prime Day promotion mix, forecasting FBA needs, or building a halo strategy that converts, we’re here to guide you through the noise and keep your brand positioned for growth.
