Two weeks on from the 2026 Prime Big Deal Days, and the whole of market numbers are in – so the team have been looking at what insights we can take from them and apply to the Golden Quarter.
And it’s been a fascinating process.
Because, while the headline numbers looked broadly fine – the event grew roughly in line with the market, and the two-day format delivered the concentrated demand signal that this year’s four-day Prime Day didn’t – the story underneath the surface is a lot more interesting and, importantly, more commercially instructive for brands thinking about how to approach the rest of this year and next.
Here’s what we learnt.
Third-party sellers won the event. Amazon retail didn’t.
The sharpest finding in the whole dataset is one that won’t appear in Amazon’s own communications: third-party sellers grew significantly faster than Amazon’s own retail operation during the event.
Third-party seller sales were up 27.5% on the same event week last year, while Amazon retail grew 13.9%.
And as a result, Amazon retail’s share of event sales fell from 39.4% to 36.7%, which is a meaningful shift when you compare the same brands and the same products year on year – and in the weeks either side of the event, Amazon retail’s share barely moved.
That’s a structural signal worth sitting with. The brands driving the event’s growth were overwhelmingly operating through third-party selling, and the data suggests that the most competitive, most well-prepared participants in the event were disproportionately in that group.
The brands that committed won disproportionately
The clearest commercial lesson from the data is a straightforward one: meaningful participation produced meaningful results, while half-hearted participation drove very little.
It’s the discount data that makes this concrete.
Products cut by 25% or more sold around 2.6 times their normal weekly volume during the event; products with no discount at all sold around 1.3 times.
Ninja is the most striking positive example of a brand offering the kind of promotional depth that actually moves the needle.
Selling over three times its normal share of the market during the event, Ninja enjoyed the kind of outperformance that doesn’t happen by accident; it’s a reflection of a deliberate and wholly committed approach to the event as a genuine growth opportunity.
And the negative example is just as instructive.
Computers & Accessories was the only major category to fall, down 20% on last year’s event, with most of the decline sitting in tablets and laptops, and Apple accounting for a substantial portion of it.
Why? Well last year, the 11-inch iPad was a genuine hero deal, with around 12,300 units sold at an average of roughly £307.
This year, the same iPad sold around 1,500 units at an average closer to £386.
The lesson here is no hero deal, no growth – it’s not that the category failed, it’s that the participation strategy did.
K-beauty rewrote an entire category in seven days
If there’s a single category story from Prime Big Deal Days 2026 that should make established brands look twice, it’s that of Skin Care.
Korean beauty brands went from 9% to 25% of Skin Care sales during the event week, accounting for around 60% of the category’s total growth over the period.
medicube (largely unknown to most UK shoppers twelve months ago) went from £0.2m to £4.2m of sales in the week and is now a top 10 brand across all of Amazon UK – almost all of it sold by third-party sellers.
On the flipside, CeraVe, Garnier and L’Oréal Paris all lost share in what looks like a category case study in what can happen when a challenger brand treats a peak event as a customer acquisition moment, and does it at scale.
The established brands in the category were present, they just weren’t committed in the same way – and the data shows exactly what that cost them.
The growth came from volume, not price
One of the more useful structural observations from the data: the event’s growth was driven by more items sold, not by higher prices; the average selling price on comparable products was essentially flat year on year.
That matters for how brands interpret their own results.
If your revenue was up but your units were flat or down, your product held price but lost competitive ground.
If your units were up, you captured a share of the volume growth.
Those are two very different stories about what the event actually delivered commercially, and knowing which side your brand fell on is key.
The category winners and losers
At category level, the big winners were Skin Care, up 49% on last year’s event, Sports & Outdoors up 45% and Fashion up 40%.
Toys too more than doubled its normal week; a reminder that the event is working more and more as an early Christmas trigger for gifting categories, with shoppers using the promotional window to get ahead of peak.
Computers & Accessories down 20% was the outlier – but more due to a participation problem than a category problem.
Our take
The data from Prime Big Deal Days 2026 is an important counter to the idea that showing up is enough.
This is an event that rewards commitment; in promotional depth, in hero deal construction and in treating the week as a genuine acquisition and visibility moment.
The brands that grew disproportionately had one thing in common: they made a bold decision about the event in advance, and they delivered against it.
The brands that lost share – in Skin Care, in Computers, in categories where new entrants moved aggressively – were usually present but not prepared in the way that ultimately reaps the rewards.
And so, with Black Friday mere weeks away, the practical question is whether the lessons from Prime Big Deal Days are being applied to the next event, or whether the same patterns will repeat.
The Bottom Line
Peak event performance on Amazon is increasingly split between brands that treat events as genuine growth moments and brands that treat them as promotional admin, and it’s a a gap this particular event has made very visible.
With the planning window for Black Friday very much open, our team is on hand to help your brand build a sharper promotional and media strategy for the peak quarter and beyond – one informed by what the market data is actually showing.
To learn more, get in touch today.
Data source: Perpetua Prism whole-market Amazon UK estimates, Prime Big Deal Days event week 2026 vs 2025.