Prime Day Recap Part 1: It May Have Been a Record Year, but CPG was Down.

By all accounts, Prime Day 2026 was the biggest on record across online retailers, with total retail data showing overall consumer spending up, likely due to competing promotions running across other major retailers like Walmart and Target. 

While Prime Day is clearly no longer just an Amazon event, it’s still telling to dig in to what we see in that channel. Specifically, independent shopper-panel data from Numerator paints a softer picture for Amazon. Average household spend dropped from $156.37 to $143.45 year over year. Average order value fell to $47.66. Our own data supports the initial Numerator reports, showing Amazon sales were down 3.5% year over year.

Shopping started early

The two weeks before Prime Day officially started saw sales up more than 7% year over year, but the official event itself came in lower. Prime Day is starting to look less like a single moment shoppers wait for and more an extended deal shopping period. 

Who Won

Within CPG, one segment did grow. Brands priced between $25 and $50 were up more than 20% sales year over year, while everything above $50 fell more than 26%. Discount depth also paints a similar picture: brands in the $25 to $50 roughly doubled their average discount, from under 5% to over 10%. 

Brands north of $100 ASP took a different path. Their discounts held essentially flat year over year, already deep over 12%, and they still lost volume, perhaps reflecting softening economic conditions as consumers shift away from higher priced discretionary purchases. 

Sales Down But Ad Spend Up?

The ad spend data tells its own version of this. Amazon Search spend barely moved, up about 1%. Amazon DSP spend fell 25%. Antidotely, many advertisers have cited budgeting to spend more but being unable to effectively deploy the spend due to a lack of demand. 

While Amazon spend remained flat, broader investment increased. Reinforcing that this has become more than just an Amazon only event but a broader shopping / discount period across all retailers. Supporting that broader shopping behavior was growing investment in social channels. Spend across Snapchat, TikTok, and Meta nearly doubled, year over year during Prime Day, with TikTok alone up 150%.

What media strategies worked?

As the final numbers continue to roll in, we will be digging into which media strategies and tactics were most effective and helped some brands buck the trend and realize strong growth. In our subsequent analysis we will be looking at media performance through the lens of incrementality.