Prime Big Deal Days 2026 was a free holiday test for DTC brands

Amazon put the dates out on September 29. Prime members only, 48 hours, kicking off Tuesday, October 6 at 12:01 a.m. Pacific and closing Wednesday night, October 7 at 11:59. Adobe tracks online spend across every US retailer (Amazon is only part of it), and this is what they expected:

Two things jump out at me.

One, these are all-retailer numbers. Adobe has said the retailers running sales alongside Amazon helped push US ecommerce spend during Prime Day in 2026 to more than 2.5 times what it was in 2020. So it’s a shopping holiday for the whole market now. And two, the discounts are pretty modest. Around 19% off is the typical deal, which is roughly what shoppers will walk into November expecting.

Adweek’s preview called the event a “dress rehearsal” for the holidays. Their read on shoppers: more price-sensitive, doing more research before they buy, and leaning toward replenishment stuff over big-ticket electronics. Back in June, Adobe found mobile drove 54.2% of Prime Day spend, an all-time high.

The AI piece is what I’d watch most. During June’s Prime Day, Adobe reported traffic to US retail sites from AI assistants was up 89% year over year, and it converted about 40% better than other traffic. They also found up to 46% of some retailers’ sites couldn’t be read by machines. So someone asks an assistant for the best option under $50 and gets an answer pieced together from whatever pages it could actually read. If yours wasn’t readable, you weren’t in it.

1. Don’t start a price fight you can’t win

Amazon and Walmart can fund deep discounts across millions of items. You probably can’t, and you shouldn’t be training your customers to wait for a sale anyway.

Give people a reason to buy that has nothing to do with price. What problem does it solve, what proof do you have, why is it an easy gift? That’s a creative job. Honestly the biggest lever we see on our side is product photos, because the shots on most brands’ PDPs aren’t good enough to make great ads from, and better photos improve the output more than anything else we’ve tried.

2. Your competitors just showed you their holiday plans

Brands almost never come up with a new offer structure for Black Friday. Whatever a rival ran during Prime week is probably what you’ll see from them in November. Bundle, gift with purchase, free shipping over some amount, plain percentage off. Go pull up their live Meta ads today while they’re still up. For each one, jot down the offer and the hook, plus who it’s talking to.

3. A crowded week tells you which ads are strong

Big retailers raise budgets around a tentpole and the auction gets pricier for everybody. Pull your Meta results for October 5 to 11 at the ad level, since campaign level hides too much. Whatever held its cost per purchase while everyone else was shouting, trust that on Black Friday.

The stuff that fell apart was probably living on cheap impressions.

4. Shoppers who researched will come back

If people are researching more before buying, a lot of the ones who looked at your product this week still haven’t made up their minds. Retarget them with comparisons, reviews, your guarantee, a quick how-it-works. Throwing another discount at someone who’s still deciding if the thing even works for them doesn’t do much.

• Day 1: export your Meta results for October 5 to 11 by ad, and mark what held cost per purchase vs. what broke.
• Day 2: go through what three to five direct competitors are running on Meta right now. One sheet, every offer and hook and who it targets.
• Day 3: pick your offer ladder (early access, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, shipping cutoff). People just saw roughly 19%, so leave yourself room above that.
• Day 4: write three to five new concepts that sell on something besides price. Aim each at a specific buyer. Make sure one is for the gift-giver.
• Day 5: build them in 9:16 and 4:5 and launch at evergreen pricing so you’re testing the idea and nothing else.
• Day 6: retargeting for this week’s product viewers. Comparison ads, review ads, guarantee ads.
• Day 7: fix the pages AI assistants read. Prices, specs, sizes, shipping, returns. Plain text on the product page. Tons of brands still have this stuff stuck inside images.

Then it’s the BFCM 2026 creative calendar from here: keep testing all month, and by Halloween your proven ads should already be live.

Days 2, 4 and 5 are pretty much what we built Copia for.

It reads your site and products, studies the ads your competitors are running live on Meta, builds buyer personas, then generates Meta-ready ad creative for each persona. For a small team, that’s how you get from “here’s what we noticed during Prime week” to a pile of different concepts quickly enough to actually test them before November.

Self-serve starts at $99 a month. If you’d rather hand it off, Managed ($2,000/mo) gets you 200 statics and 2 videos delivered a month, and I push our team hard on variety, cutting anything that looks too close to another ad in the same batch.

Want to knock out day 2 right now? Drop a competitor into the free Competitor Ad Teardown and you’ll see every Meta ad they’re running, hooks and angles broken down.