How to Analyze Your Prime Day Performance

Prime Day is now behind us: sales are in and it was another record breaking event for Amazon. How third-party sellers performed varied based on category and how well they prepared. Now is the time to review your own performance and apply what you learn to your Q4 preparations. In this article I’ll review the numbers and provide tips on how sellers can learn from this year’s Prime Day event.

Prime Day by the Numbers

Internet Retailer is estimating that Amazon brought in a whopping $7.16 billion in global sales over the two-day event for a total of 175 million products. This is up 71% from the 36-hour sale last year and exceeded Amazon’s sales from last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.

Amazon reports that third-party sellers did more than $2 billion in sales during the 48-hour event. This represents just under a third of total Prime Day sales and is quite a bit lower than the 58% of annual sales third-party sellers had in 2018. Much of this is due to Amazon pushing its own products, especially its Alexa-enabled devices, Kindles, and Fire TVs.

In the accounts we manage at Egility, we saw a wide range of overall sales performance. Many accounts saw 2x increases, some went as high as 6x. Generally speaking, Prime Day 1 had higher sales than day 2, although we saw brands that sell add-ons and accessories had a much stronger day 2.

Some of the variations we saw in performance were due to whether or not the brand participated in Prime Day using coupons, Prime Day deals, or Lightning Deals. Those that offered discounts saw much higher sales increases than those that did not. We also saw higher increases for higher-priced products that were running promotions.

There was unfortunately an apparent glitch or oversight in the clothing category where many variation pages did not have a visible Prime Day deal badge in search or on the product page until a size/color was selected which impacted total sales over the two-day event. We also saw a lower performance from brands that did not have Prime-eligible products.

Evaluating Your Performance

As an Amazon seller, you should review your own performance on Prime Day and apply what you learned to future tentpole events like Black Friday. Here are a few things you can look at:

1. Did you run coupons or other promotions? If so, did you see a lift for those particular products? If not, are you aware of whether or not your coupons were active and showing during Prime Day?
2. If you ran promotions, was the sales lift enough to make up for the money spent on discounts? Or did you accomplish another goal such as clearing out inventory, or increasing sales velocity post-Prime Day?
3. Were there some products that surprised you and moved faster than expected? Are there products that didn’t see a lift?
4. Did you overstock or understock your inventory? Did you have enough inventory on hand to restock post-Prime Day?
5. Look at your advertising performance. Did you run out of budget part way through the day? Did you see a similar lift in ad sales as you did in total sales? Did your conversion rate and ACoS hold or did you see a big drop or spike? Were any unique search terms generated from the increase in traffic and sales?

Looking at each of these points, is there something different you should do for Q4 and especially Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Don’t let Amazon’s largest shopping day in history just go by without doing an analysis of your own performance. Finding what went well and what didn’t can help you create a solid action plan to help make future events even more successful for your Amazon business.