We explore the preparation that so many established brands still underestimate – and what the strongest do differently ahead of peak periods…
Every year, the gap between the brands that perform on Amazon at peak and the brands that don’t comes down to the same thing: preparation that happened weeks earlier than the brands that struggled thought it needed to.
That was the consistent thread running through our latest Beyond the Listings session on Prime Day – a conversation between Venture Forge’s Travis Chappell (Head of Operations), Emma Pickard (Head of Client Services), Mike Godsiff (Head of Advertising and Media) and PJ van Rooyen, Head of E-commerce and Brand at Ultimate Sports Nutrition.
And while the session used Prime Day as the lens, this is an evergreen read because these principles apply to every peak event across the Amazon calendar.
If you’re reviewing your Amazon Content at peak, you’re too late
The most common error, as Emma put it plainly, is treating content as something that gets attended to when there’s time.
The reality is that by the time a peak event arrives, it’s too late to fix what content should have been doing.
Conversion rate during a high-traffic event is a direct signal of retail readiness, and a product that attracts strong traffic but fails to convert isn’t suffering from a promotional problem; its content isn’t doing its job.
Competitors communicating value more clearly will win that comparison, regardless of how established the brand is or how competitive the price.
And during Prime Day, when traffic volumes make everything more visible and more expensive, weak content becomes more costly in both directions.
So the practical question isn’t whether content needs attention – it’s which content, on which ASINs, and what specifically needs to change.
Emma’s recommendation was to look at where conversion dropped against products you expected to perform, check what competitors are doing differently on those pages, and treat that review as an ongoing process rather than a pre-event checkbox.
Ready to follow the conversation in full? Click here to watch on demand
Budget flexibility beats budget size
One of the clearer debates in the session was around ad spend strategy at peak; whether to run a fixed budget through the event or to stay actively flexible.
And the panel’s view was consistent: flexibility matters more than total budget.
Mike described the day-by-day pattern of Prime Day as inherently variable, noting that this year’s four-day format produced a flatter trend than previous years where day one tended to be strong, days two and three varied and day four recovered as last-minute intent increased.
Under those circumstances, setting a fixed daily budget across all four days ignores that pattern entirely.
The stronger approach, as Mike and PJ both described, is to stay responsive – moving budget toward the day types that are working, pulling back on formats that are expensive relative to what they’re returning and being willing and able to push harder on day four when last-minute purchase behaviour is strongest.
That flexibility also extends to ad format mix: pulling back on Sponsored Products when CPCs spike on the day, and redirecting into Sponsored Brands to maintain visibility at the top of search at a lower cost per click.
The advice post-event was equally clear: don’t stop, because the customers who were on Amazon during Prime Day don’t disappear on day five.
Continuing to advertise, particularly through remarketing, into the days and weeks that follow keeps momentum building rather than letting it drop off at the point it could be sustained.
Not everything needs to be on deal
A point PJ made from direct experience at USN – and one that applies equally to any brand with a broad catalogue – is that the instinct to put hero products on promotion during peak events isn’t always commercially sound.
If a product sells consistently at full price, discounting it during Prime Day doesn’t grow the business; it reduces margin on sales that were already happening.
The more interesting promotional strategy is to use peak traffic to move the needle on secondary products – lines that don’t sell themselves organically, that might benefit from the uplift in platform-wide intent, and that could reach a new customer segment if given visibility at a promotional price.
USN’s example was practical: with electrolyte products naturally suited to the summer period, the focus shifted toward amino acids and other products that shoppers might not seek out actively but would consider at a discount during a browse-heavy event.
The result was incremental demand, not discounted revenue on existing demand.
The same logic applies to using peak events for product launches or range introductions.
A product launched a month before a major event, with deal pricing timed to the event, picks up the benefit of high traffic at the point it needs initial momentum the most.
Tail-end ASINs can be moved into stronger positions on the catalogue if they’re genuinely optimised before the event.
But, as PJ noted, that’s the condition – advertising a poorly optimised product into a high-traffic moment is expensive and inefficient.
The Amazon Calendar beyond Prime Day
The session closed with a discussion of the broader peak event calendar and a specific flag from Travis on back to school, which has now been confirmed as a Tier 1 event by Amazon and will receive significant platform-level promotion over the coming weeks.
Back to school in particular is worth taking seriously for a broader range of categories than the name implies – Mike’s point was that search behaviour in the back-to-school window extends well beyond stationery and uniforms.
And USN’s experience of electrolyte sales rising as school sports activities resume is a practical illustration of how categories that seem unrelated to the occasion can benefit from the broader uplift in purchase intent.
The principle the panel returned to repeatedly was to plan the full year, not event by event.
A promotional schedule mapped to Amazon’s key moments – the large Tier 1 events and the growing secondary events – gives brands a structure to operate within rather than a series of reactive decisions.
It’s also significantly easier to execute well when preparation starts early enough to get inventory, content and ad strategy properly aligned before Amazon announces deal deadlines.
Our take
Peak event performance isn’t decided during the event, it’s decided by the quality of preparation that preceded it.
Content that isn’t retail-ready won’t convert high-traffic periods into sales.
Ad budgets that aren’t managed flexibly won’t make the most of the demand pattern.
And promotional strategies that default to discounting hero products are often creating margin pressure without creating incremental growth.
The brands that perform best at Prime Day, Black Friday and every event between them are the ones who’ve built the fundamentals properly in advance, and who stay honest about what the data is telling them after each one.
The Bottom Line
If your brand is already thinking about Q4, you’re in good company, and roughly on track.
If you’re not, the window for getting content, inventory and strategy properly aligned before Black Friday is shorter than it feels right now.
For the complete conversation, including benchmarking approaches, ad strategy across the four-day window and how to use post-event data to build a clearer H2 plan, click the link to watch the full Beyond the Listings session on demand.
And if you’d like our team’s help with peak event planning or a sharper view of where your account stands going into H2, we’d love to talk – click here to get in touch today.