What does Prime Day do for a small seller without a deal? Orders and ads on 9 accounts
Before Prime Day and Black Friday, many sellers expect some of the extra traffic to reach them. In 2026 Amazon held Prime Day from June 23 to 26. We looked at what happened on those four days on 9 small seller accounts that did not pay Amazon for a deal placement (Lightning Deal, Best Deal).
The result: the number of orders did not really go up. Ads were shown more often, but people clicked them less and they brought fewer orders than before.
How we measured
Prime Day ran Tuesday to Friday. So we compared the four days with the Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays of the four weeks before and the four weeks after, because weekend traffic is different. The period before ran from May 26 to June 22 and the period after from June 27 to July 24, each with 16 Tuesday-to-Friday days.
The orders came from the German, French, Italian, Spanish, UK and Irish marketplaces of 9 accounts; we left out the US. We added up ad data only for the euro marketplaces (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Ireland) so that currencies would not mix. That covers the ads of 8 accounts.
In the accounts' financial events, none of them has a deal fee (Deal Participation Fee) after June 6. So no account ran a paid deal for Prime Day. This data does not show a fee-free Prime Exclusive Discount.
Orders
| Daily average, Tuesday to Friday | Before | Prime Day | After |
|---|---|---|---|
| All 9 accounts | 22.56 | 25.25 | 28.13 |
| Without Molly Cat | 21.56 | 21.00 | 23.19 |
| Going Forward, Germany | 12.50 | 11.25 | 12.13 |
| Molly Cat | 1.00 | 4.25 | 4.94 |
The total rose by 12%, but one account accounts for it. Molly Cat's ad data starts on May 17, and its weekly orders in June went like this: 7, 7, 11, then 31 in the Prime Day week and 41 in the week after. After Prime Day it sold more per day than during it. So the growth did not come from Prime Day. Without it, the other 8 accounts got 21.00 orders a day on Prime Day and 21.56 before.
The largest account, Going Forward's German marketplace, brought 55% of the 9 accounts' orders on the Tuesdays to Fridays before. On Prime Day it got 11.25 orders a day, against 12.50 before and 12.13 after.
Besides Molly Cat, one more account showed a rise, and it partly fell back afterwards. Going Forward's UK marketplace got 2.75 orders a day on Prime Day, against 0.69 before and 1.44 after. On the same days its UK ads were shown three times as often as before (2,219 times a day instead of 757). That is 11 orders over the four days, and we cannot separate how many came from Prime Day and how many from the extra ads.
An earlier event shows the same. On Quadrofixing's German marketplace, Prime Day on July 8-11, 2025 brought 42.5 sessions a day, against 42.7 in the four weeks before.
Ads
| 8 accounts, euro marketplaces, daily average, Tuesday to Friday | Before | Prime Day | After |
|---|---|---|---|
| Impressions | 28,757 | 34,814 | 34,954 |
| Clicks | 209.8 | 176.5 | 253.8 |
| Click-through rate (CTR) | 0.729% | 0.507% | 0.726% |
| Cost per click (CPC) | €0.548 | €0.576 | €0.575 |
| Ad-attributed orders | 13.56 | 10.00 | 14.31 |
Ads were shown 21% more often but got 16% fewer clicks. The click-through rate fell from 0.729% to 0.507% and went back to 0.726% after Prime Day. Looking at each account and marketplace separately (here the UK is included), it fell during Prime Day on 10 of 12 advertised account-marketplaces.
On most account-marketplaces clicks did not get more expensive. The average cost per click rose by 5%, but it went down on 8 of the 12 account-marketplaces. The average rose because a larger share of the clicks came from more expensive account-marketplaces. If every euro account-marketplace had kept the same share of clicks as before, the average at Prime Day prices would have been 7% lower than before.
Ad-attributed orders fell from 13.56 to 10.00 a day. The likely explanation: on Prime Day the buyer sees many discounted offers side by side, and picks the ad of a product without a deal less often.
What this data does not tell you
This is one Prime Day on 9 accounts, not an experiment. The accounts also changed their ads during this time, so for a single account the cause of a change cannot be separated. We also have no data on what a paid deal would have brought, because no account ran one. If you run a deal, the result may be different.
What to do before Black Friday
In 2026 Black Friday falls on November 27 and Cyber Monday on November 30.
- Decide whether you run a deal. For us, Prime Day without a deal behaved like an ordinary weekday: the 8 accounts got 21.00 orders a day, against 21.56 before. If you do not run a deal, do not plan for more orders and do not order extra stock for it.
- Do not raise bids by reflex. On most account-marketplaces clicks did not get more expensive, but ad-attributed orders went down. Paying more for the same impression does not bring back the buyers who chose something else.
- Watch the click-through rate. If your ad is shown more often but clicked less, the bid is not too low: the ad is shown, buyers just choose something else. For us the rate was back at its earlier level in the four weeks after the event.
- Compare the same weekdays. Compare a Tuesday-to-Friday event with earlier Tuesdays to Fridays, not with the weekend before, or you are measuring the difference between days of the week.
- Measure afterwards too. For us the four weeks after the event said more about where the accounts were heading than the four days themselves. You can see daily ad data in Seller Central's Campaign Manager; we wrote about the click-through rate in a separate article.