Peak Season Prep: What Brands Can Learn From Amazon's Biggest Day of the Year

Amazon Prime Day is the mid-summer shopping event that serves as a litmus test of what to expect for the Q4 holiday season. Every July, Prime Day offers a valuable “dress rehearsal” for upcoming critical shopping periods such as back-to-school and the holidays. This year, Prime Day hit record-breaking sales, with shoppers spending $14.2 billion online across retailers in the U.S. This success signals a promising start to peak season, with ample opportunities for growth.

During busy shopping moments, common pitfalls such as shipping delays, stock shortages, and unsatisfied customers can take a toll on sellers if they're unprepared. However, with Prime Day's annual significant boost in sales and customer engagement, brands can glean crucial insights to fine-tune their retail media strategies and optimize their operations for the peak season ahead.

Here are five key lessons brands can take from Amazon Prime Day to help prepare for a profitable peak shopping season:

1. Leverage data-driven insights.

Prime Day provides sellers with a treasure trove of data, offering insights into customer behavior, sales trends, and inventory management. For example, a report from Rithum found that consumer electronics, home and kitchen appliances, and clothing were the best-selling categories during Prime Day in 2023. Post-event, brands should dive into their data reports to evaluate their performance. Identifying what worked and what didn’t will enable brands to make informed adjustments to their strategies for Q4. These reports should ideally be customized to each brand’s business objectives to help sellers optimize their advertising spend and ensure they’re hitting the right target audiences. Adjusting ad spend based on these insights will help maintain momentum, allowing brands to prepare for a strong finish to the year.

2. Use management tools to help enhance inventory.

Automation tools are essential for managing inventory effectively during high-traffic periods. Dynamic pricing, real-time monitoring, and stock alerts can prevent both stock-outs and overstock issues, ensuring brands are always ready to meet sudden changes in customer demand. Tools like automated repricing can dynamically adjust prices based on competitor pricing and inventory levels, helping sellers remain competitive without manually monitoring prices. Performance monitoring tools can identify and address real-time issues, allowing quick adaptations during high-traffic sales events.

3. Ensure profitability with comprehensive cost management.

A comprehensive view of costs, including shipping, storage and platform fees, is essential to ensure profitability during peak shopping periods. By employing tools now that provide a complete picture of current costs, brands can make informed decisions on pricing and ad spend, ensuring every sale contributes positively to their bottom line. For example, accounting for shipping costs, storage fees and platform fees in real time helps sellers understand how overall spending affects total sales. This holistic view of costs allows for better margin management and reduces the risk of lost revenue.

4. Streamline shipping operations.

Holiday e-commerce sales are projected to grow by 9.5 percent this year. With the continued growth of online shopping, brands may be caught off guard by the volume of orders requiring shipping. Integrated systems can help brands handle increased order volumes without compromising service quality. Brands can leverage these tools for order routing, shipping and returns to increase efficiency and customer satisfaction.

If a brand sells across multiple channels, order routing and management tools allow sellers to track and manage orders from multiple marketplaces — such as Amazon.com, eBay, and Walmart — all in one place to ensure timely and accurate deliveries. Leveraging platforms with the capability to integrate with various shipping carriers can even automate tracking information updates, providing customers with real-time status on their orders. Additionally, an efficient returns management system can streamline the processing of returns and exchanges, offering a smooth customer experience post-sale.

5. Maximize retail media ROI.

Reflecting on the recent Amazon Prime Day, brands can optimize campaigns based on the event’s results to maximize visibility and return on investment. Leading up to peak promotional season, brands should consider scaling back retail media ad spend incrementally. This strategy helps capitalize on Prime Day successes without deflating progress made during the event. Monitoring campaign performance and making real-time adjustments can prevent gaps in ad performance and ensure continuous sales momentum. Using data from their full-funnel e-commerce businesses, brands can monitor ad performance and consumer behavior to dynamically adjust bidding, budgets and ad targeting on an hourly basis. These optimizations should also include consideration of running different ad types, as each ad unit serves a different strategy within the marketing funnel. From top of funnel awareness driving down to conversion, this combination of strategies allows sellers to respond swiftly to changing conditions and maximize the impact of their advertising campaigns.

Beyond paid campaign optimizations, brands should also prioritize on-page content optimizations prior to the sale date to boost their organic presence for key search opportunities. This includes adding new content such as brand or product video, which increases a user’s time on page and overall engagement. Additionally, as Amazon’s ad platform was down for advertisers for a portion of the Prime Day event this year, this furthers the need to optimize organic on-page content as well as advertising.

Amazon Prime Day has come and gone, but it’s left brands with new insight to build on the event’s success and maximize the next phase of the peak shopping season. With these takeaways, brands will be well-positioned to reach profitability during the holiday rush.

Meghan Barden is the director of global retail media at Rithum, a provider of end-to-end e-commerce solutions for retailers and brands.