For years, Prime Day has served as a predictable spike in Amazon sales. It’s an annual tentpole with familiar rules and repeatable tactics. But 2025 changes the game. Amazon has stretched Prime Day into a record-breaking 96-hour event (July 8–11), paired with sweeping updates to how deals are structured, discovered, and optimized.
What does that mean for brands? Past playbooks won’t cut it. Prime Day 2025 requires sellers to adapt fast, go deeper into performance data and align their marketplace strategy with broader trends. Brands previously needed to front-load their entire Prime Day investment into 48 hours of intense competition. The new format allows for more sophisticated resource allocation across sustained engagement periods.
It’s a performance benchmark; one that will test your visibility, agility and ability to respond to industry changes.
What’s new on Prime Day 2025
1. “Today’s Big Deals” brings new urgency and complexity
Amazon is introducing “Today’s Big Deals”—exclusive, curated daily offers that refresh each day of Prime Day. These offers inject time-sensitive urgency into the shopping experience, but they also demand sharper merchandising coordination.
To position products for maximum visibility within themed days, Amazon businesses must think beyond traditional category placement. Success requires understanding not just what customers buy, but when and why they buy it. Products that align with daily themes while maintaining strong fundamentals in pricing and presentation will capture disproportionate attention.
Smart Amazon sellers are already analyzing historical data to predict which themes will generate the most relevant traffic for their products, then building inventory and promotional strategies accordingly.
2. “Prime for Young Adults” as a new audience emerges
Amazon’s new Prime for Young Adults replaces the old student discount, unlocking a 50% Prime membership for Gen Z and younger Millennials. During Prime Day, these members get 10% cash back on popular categories, doubling the normal 5%.
Young adult consumers prioritize authenticity, value and social responsibility in ways that directly impact purchasing decisions. They research extensively before buying, rely heavily on peer recommendations, and expect brands to align with their values. This means brands must adjust not only their messaging but their entire product selection and positioning plan.
3. Alexa+ is quietly reshaping search
More than 1 million U.S. consumers now have access to Alexa+, Amazon’s AI-powered voice assistant. It serves personalized deal alerts, wish list reminders and price-drop notifications all without opening the app.
For sellers, this means a subtle but powerful change: voice and AI discovery are becoming part of the conversion path. To stay relevant, brands must invest in Amazon Listing Optimization that aligns with how Alexa indexes content: clear titles, concise feature bullets and rich, structured metadata.
Alexa+ also proactively recommends deals based on user behavior, wish lists and shopping history. This creates opportunities for well-optimized listings to surface in contexts where customers weren't actively searching for those specific products. Plus, voice search optimization requires understanding how people naturally speak and ask questions. The difference between "bluetooth headphones wireless" and "find me good wireless headphones under fifty dollars" illustrates the challenge brands face in adapting their Amazon listing optimization strategies.
4. Tariffs, pricing pressure and customer trust
Ongoing tariff hikes are squeezing product margins, particularly for imported goods. While Amazon has committed to keeping prices low during Prime Day, value perception will be front and center for shoppers in 2025.
Rather than simply cutting prices, successful sellers are emphasizing total value propositions: quality, convenience, service and long-term benefits that justify purchase decisions even in challenging economic times.
It's worth addressing misinformation circulating about Amazon displaying tariff surcharges on listings. Amazon has made clear it won't implement such displays, maintaining its traditional approach to pricing transparency. This means sellers should let their listings do the talking through optimized, informative and benefit-driven content.
5. Prime Day 2025 goes beyond Amazon
It’s not just about Amazon anymore. As with previous years, major competitors like Walmart, Target and Best Buy are running parallel promotions that either overlap with or immediately follow Prime Day.
This means shoppers aren’t just comparing products. They’re comparing platforms, evaluating who offers the fastest shipping, the most rewards and the best deal on the same product.
This entails thinking beyond a single platform. Sellers that deploy coordinated, multichannel campaigns will outperform those that silo their Prime Day efforts within Amazon alone. Sync your messaging across all D2C and marketplace channels to stay top-of-mind wherever shoppers browse.
What smart brands are doing differently in 2025
1. Prioritizing Amazon listing optimization
With AI discovery and theme-based merchandising, listing optimization is your frontline defense. Small changes make a big difference, from keyword research and high quality images to mobile performance and A+ content.
As an Amazon Growth Agency, Cart.com leverages performance data to craft listings that show up in search and convert. The complexity of balancing algorithm requirements and competitive positioning requires expertise that most brands struggle to develop internally.
2. Coordinated campaigns drive the biggest lift
Data from 2024 revealed that brands using all three Amazon advertising types (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display) saw 139% better sales lift compared to those using individual ad types.
Coordinated campaigns create multiple touchpoints throughout customer journeys. Potential customers might first encounter a brand through Sponsored Display retargeting. Then, they research products through Sponsored Products, and ultimately convert through Sponsored Brands campaigns.
3. Partnering with a growth marketing team that can scale
The days of successful DIY Amazon strategies are largely behind us, replaced by a reality where platform expertise directly correlates with competitive advantage. Partnering with an experienced, full service Amazon agency gives you access to data, tech and talent that most internal teams can’t scale quickly.
When growth marketing partners truly understand your business objectives, they become extensions of your team rather than external vendors.
Contact Cart.com’s Amazon growth experts today to develop your winning Prime Day 2025 strategy before your competition does.