Prime Day 2026 runs June 23-26. The deal submission deadline was May 26. If you missed it, or chose not to discount, your next twelve days matter more than you might think.
Buyers on Amazon during Prime Day are hunting for discounts. If your product doesn’t have a deal badge, your sales will drop relative to normal, and if you pull your ads entirely to avoid wasted spend, your position in Amazon search results can take weeks to recover after the event ends. Neither outcome is inevitable. Both are avoidable with the right setup this week.
Your Sales Will Drop — Here’s How to Limit It
Prime Day 2025 drove $24.1 billion in U.S. e-commerce sales, a 30.3% increase from 2024 (Skai 2025). That volume floods Amazon with category traffic whether or not your product is on sale.
The problem is purchase intent. Shoppers arriving on June 23 are primed to buy things with deal badges, and they’ll scroll past full-price listings faster than on a normal day. Your conversion rate will be lower. That means every dollar of ad spend produces fewer sales than you’re used to.
That’s not an argument to stop advertising. It’s an argument to spend less and spend smarter: on the campaigns and keywords where your product already converts well, not on broad terms where you’re now competing against deeply discounted competitors.
There’s also a search position stake. Amazon factors ongoing traffic into where your product ranks in search results. A four-day drop in traffic registers in the algorithm, and recovering that position after Prime Day ends takes time. Sellers who go completely dark during the event often spend the following two to three weeks climbing back to where they were.
What to Do With Your Amazon Ads Before June 23
Put your budget behind your most profitable campaigns
Destaney Wishon of BTR Media, who manages Amazon advertising for high-volume brands, recommends this posture for sellers without deals: “Maybe I’m not running any deal or discounts. Maybe I want to focus solely on having a low ACOS. I can shift my budget to all my efficiency campaigns, which are focused solely on the highest profitability campaigns.” (AM/PM Podcast #528, 2026)
In practice, that means pulling budget away from campaigns targeting broad, category-level keywords and concentrating it on the keywords and products where your ACOS (advertising cost as a percentage of sales) is already where you want it.
Never cut your brand defense campaigns
Regardless of whether you’re running a deal, keep your branded keyword campaigns fully funded. Competitors bid on your brand name during Prime Day specifically because traffic is elevated and buyers are less loyal than usual. If a shopper searches your brand name and your competitor’s ad appears above your listing, you lose a customer you already earned. This is the one campaign type that should never pause during a peak event.
Raise your daily budget caps before June 23
One of the most common Prime Day mistakes: sellers leave daily ad budgets at normal levels, and the campaigns exhaust their budget by mid-morning while competitors keep running (Autron, 2026). During Prime Day 2025, click-through rates rose 30.5% across Amazon ads (Skai 2025), which means your existing budget gets used up faster even if you haven’t changed a single bid. Review your daily caps before the event.
Consider targeting your competitors’ deal pages
If a competitor in your category is running a Prime Day deal, their product page will see unusually high traffic. Amazon’s Sponsored Display ads let you target specific competitor product pages, placing your ad in front of shoppers who are already looking at that category. You don’t need a deal to run this, and the traffic tends to be higher quality than broad keyword traffic because the shopper is already in the buying mindset for your type of product.
Not Sure Where to Begin?
If you are looking at this list and not sure where your account stands, that is exactly what an Opportunity Review is for. We look at where you are across listings, inventory, ads, deals, and pricing, and tell you specifically what is worth addressing before June 23 and what can wait.
No obligation. Just a clear picture of where you stand before the biggest sales event of the summer.
👉 Request an Opportunity ReviewHow to Keep Your Search Position During Prime Day
Sellers without deals face a specific risk: lower sales during Prime Day, followed by weaker search position in the weeks after. Three things prevent this from compounding:
- Keep some traffic flowing to your listing. Your position in Amazon search results is partly driven by consistent traffic to your product page. If your ads go completely dark for four days, that absence shows up in the data. Even a reduced budget on your most profitable campaigns is better than nothing.
- Don’t change your price reactively. Dropping your price during Prime Day without going through Amazon’s proper deal structures, like a Prime Exclusive Discount, doesn’t give you the deal badge that shoppers are filtering for, but it does affect the price history Amazon uses to calculate your “Typical Price.” That has downstream effects on whether future promotions show a strikethrough price, which matters for conversion.
- Fix inventory and listing issues before June 23. Stranded inventory, suppressed listings, or incomplete A+ content compound during high-traffic periods. A product that’s 90% optimized on a normal day can lose significant ground during Prime Day when buyers have more options to click past you. Check Seller Central for any open issues this week.
The 48 Hours After Prime Day Are Your Best Window
Here is what sellers without deals consistently underestimate: the two days immediately after Prime Day closes are among the highest-revenue days of the year, and they disproportionately favor brands that didn’t run deals.
Acadia’s analysis of Prime Day 2025 found that combined sales on the two days following the event increased 236.82% compared to the same dates the previous year (Acadia 2025). Shoppers who browsed during Prime Day but didn’t buy are still in the market. According to purchase timing data from BTR Media’s AMC analysis, only 20% of Prime Day ad clicks converted within the first 12 hours. The other 80% of shoppers who saw your product and didn’t purchase are still making decisions.
Set up these two campaigns before June 23, not after:
- Sponsored Display retargeting: Target shoppers who visited your product page but didn’t buy. These campaigns reach those buyers across Amazon and off-site in the days after the event. They can be live within 24 hours of setup.
- DSP remarketing (if you have access): Push to cart abandoners and product viewers in the 48-hour post-event window, when buyer intent is still elevated but deal fatigue is setting in.
The sellers who capture this window are the ones who had the campaigns ready before Prime Day started. Setting them up on June 27 means missing the highest-intent two days of the post-event period.
Key Takeaways
- Prime Day 2026 runs June 23-26. No deal live means lower sales per ad dollar, but the right strategy limits the damage and positions you for the post-event rebound.
- Shift your ad budget to campaigns where your cost per sale (ACOS) is already strong. Pull back on broad, category-level terms where you’re competing against discounted products.
- Never pause your brand name campaigns. Competitors bid on your brand specifically during high-traffic events.
- Raise your daily ad budget caps before June 23. Click-through rates rose 30.5% during Prime Day 2025; normal caps will exhaust by mid-morning.
- The two days after Prime Day closed saw 236.82% higher sales in 2025 (Acadia). Set up Sponsored Display retargeting now, before the event starts, not after.
The Bottom Line
Sitting out Prime Day deals is a legitimate choice. Sitting out Prime Day entirely isn’t. The sellers who come out of June 23-26 in the best position are the ones who spent deliberately, protected their search position, and had retargeting ready before the event opened.
Every step in this article is something you can complete before June 23.
If this Prime Day caught you without a deal or without a clear plan, the right time to fix that is before the dates are announced for the next one, not three weeks before it starts. We can review your Amazon account and show you specifically what’s limiting your revenue and what your ad setup should look like heading into a major sales event.
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