Amazon’s 11th annual Prime Day event this year spanned July 8 to July 11, which the company reported “…deliver[ed] record sales and savings.” As in years past, we reviewed the websites of 116 brands and retailers to see how they did – and didn’t – choose to compete with the four-day sale.

Following are some of our key findings from this review of 116 brands. We saw that:

  • 76 of the 116 we reviewed participated in some way in the event. This number is up from the 64 that participated in the October 2024 event. Most of these brands ran some sort of discount on their site, with 16 running sitewide sales. Other brands offered customers incentives such as gifts with purchase and double the loyalty points. Yeti offered shoppers free customization on their products if they were a loyalty account member. Twelve brands offered free shipping this year to shoppers as a part of Prime Day promotions, in addition to product discounts.
  • Other retailers continue to lean into exclusive member sales. During the October 2024 Amazon Prime event, nine retailers offered members-only perks. This July, 19 retailers promoted similar benefits to loyalty account holders and paid members. Perks ranged from being the only way to shop the sales event to free standard shipping. For many of these retailers, the members-only sales events were marketed as their own version of Prime Day, such as LEGO’s “insiders days,” Lowe’s Member Week, and Target’s Circle Week.
  • Promotional language included Prime Day buzz. Brands and retailers rode the “prime” wave with the sales language on their sites. Eighteen used “prime” in some way to market their promotions or similar “two” or “four days only” offers to drive excitement. Other retailers used season-specific messaging, with “Black Friday in July” popular for numerous brands (e.g., HP, KitchenAid, and PC Richard & Sons) to promote offers.
  • Some brands actively took steps to counter inventory hoarding. In a handful of instances we encountered visible challenges when entering the brand sites or adding merchandise to our carts. Usually, shoppers enjoy frictionless and invisible challenges from these bot tools when they visit their favorite brand sites. But during special events, brands also must manage the risk of inventory hoarding by bots. Brands and retailers avoid this with bot management tools that differentiate between humans and bots through invisible and visible challenges like CAPTCHA. When asked, 21% US online adults said they often abandoned a transaction due to this kind of challenge. As bots and AI agents continue to become part of the shopping experience and grow in their use as a tool, retailers looking to avoid the challenges should also remember to reduce the friction in experience to human shoppers.

If you’re interested in our Prime Day key findings from previous years, you can review our analyses from 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.

Now that one of the biggest retail events of the year has concluded, stay tuned for Forrester’s end-of-year holiday season planning and advice for retailers and brands in the coming months. Connect with us and other Forrester analysts to learn more about holiday strategies and tactics as we dive into the second half of 2025.