What Amazon Prime Day Predicts About Upcoming Holiday Shopping Trends

Young couple enjoying Christmas in the city — Happy family and their daughter shopping online for Christmas
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Controversy erupted early on July 8, the first of Amazon Prime Day’s four-day sales extravaganza. Momentum Commerce, which manage $7 billion in sales annually on Amazon, reported first day sales were down 41% compared to last year. An Amazon spokesperson fired back, telling Forbes that the report was “highly inaccurate” and that Momentum, being a third-party, didn’t have access to the full dataset.

However, the damage was done, thanks to the anchoring bias where the first news is what sticks in people’s memory. Amazon’s post-Prime Day wrap-up didn’t help the situation, since it provided no sales figures or any hint at growth. It claimed recording-breaking sales, but then by expanding from a two-day to a four-day format, Amazon was bound to break records.

Questions remained even after Adobe Analytics reported that aggregated four-day e-commerce sales exceeded projections, totaling $24.1 billion in online retail sales on a 30.3% year-over-year increase. Increasingly, analysts look to Prime Day results to help forecast holiday retail performance. The apples-to-oranges comparison complicates an already complicated picture.

Amazon Prime Day Debrief

Digging into a variety of sources provides a clearer picture of how Amazon performed over Prime Day and where the retail market is headed into the holiday season.

Let’s start here: Consumers didn’t wait until July Prime Day to pick up their shopping pace. For June, retailers posted a 0.6% seasonally adjusted uptick in spending from May and a 3.7% unadjusted increase year-over-year.

Amazon Prime Day Results Fell Below Estimates

While Momentum’s first day report may have been discredited, it released a final estimate that Amazon Prime Day sales over the four days generated 4.9% total sales growth compared to the combined performance of 2024’s two-day Prime Day and the two days immediately following.

That fell well under Momentum’s prediction of 9.1% growth for Amazon over the four-day event. Momentum also expected that demand would be softer during the first two days and to build on days three and four.

Amazon Web Traffic Down

Similarweb, which tracks online traffic, found in an apples-to-apples comparison that Amazon web traffic was down. Average daily visits to Amazon.com dropped 15% comparing last year’s two-day event (July 16 and 17) to this year’s four-days (July 8 to 11). FOMO (fear of missing out) played in Amazon’s favor in 2024.

And app usage followed a similar downward trajectory. Last year’s two-day event averaged 113.9 million visitors per day compared to an average of 104.1 million per day over the four-days, a 9% drop. Nonetheless, Amazon still attracted over 400 million visitors to this year’s Prime Day.

Prime Day Purchase Intent Strong

However, when shoppers showed up to Amazon Prime Day, they came loaded for bear, according to a post-Prime Day survey conducted among 400 consumers by Coresight.

Some 48% of consumers reported making a purchase, compared with 38% last year and bettering the 34% who planned to make a purchase, based on a May pre-event survey. There also was a significant increase in the share of 2025 Amazon Prime Day shoppers who reported spending more (43%) compared to 31% last year.

Coresight’s consumer research also revealed shoppers widely engaged with competing sales events hosted by Walmart and Target. Over one-third of consumers reported they compared offerings across multiple retailers. They also mixed planned with spontaneous impulse buys and were motivated by early access offers and staggered promotional deals.

Commenting on the survey results, Coresight’s John Mercer, who manages the firm’s global research, noted that there was a significant amount of opportunistic shopping behavior this year tied to Prime Day, as consumers sought to maximize value across competing sales events.

“When consumers are cautious about inflation or the macro-environment, as we’ve seen in previous holiday seasons, they tend to pull forward some spending to spread out costs,” he said. “We think that is the case this year with consumers having concerns about inflation-driven price rises late in the season.”

Net/Net

We’ll have to wait until Amazon reports on July 31 to get a better accounting. It’s up against a comparative 9% increase to $90 billion in North America net sales in the second quarter last year, excluding AWS. In the first quarter, North America sales advanced 8% to $92.9 billion.

Holiday 2025 Early Outlook

Looking ahead to the holiday shopping season, Mercer and the Coresight team see positive momentum, despite widespread consumer concern about tariffs increasing prices as the year advances.

Coresight provided three possible scenarios for fourth-quarter retail performance. The most likely is retail growth in the 2.5% to 3% range, what it calls the central scenario.

Interestingly, Coresight’s machine-learning model forecasts a 3.5% year-over-year increase, the upside scenario. However, the analyst team considers the more moderate growth forecast to be more “reasonable,” with a 45% overall probability versus a 30% probability for the upside scenario.

Coresight also figures there is a 25% probability that retail sales will decline by 2.5% or more in the fourth quarter, should the economy take a turn for the worse with increased layoffs and rising prices causing consumer sentiment to deteriorate.

“This would accelerate deal-seeking consumer behaviors and could ultimately contribute to stagflation (slow economic growth and persistently high inflation) or a recession (two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth),” Coresight warned.

Another confounding factor that might mitigate retail growth in the fourth quarter is what Mercer described as the “lumpy” supply chain. Retailers picked up imports before April’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement, followed by a slump and another surge after the worse of the tariffs were postponed to August 1.

“It makes it hard to match demand with supply,” he said. “So if we get to the holiday season and there is relatively solid consumer demand, the supply may not be there to match it. We could see a replay of holiday 2021, when consumers saw bare shelves and struggled to get some products.

“Markdowns were far fewer then and more was sold at full price. So counterintuitively, we could end up seeing less discounting this holiday if the lumpy supply chain doesn’t match up to consumer demand,” he said.

Don’t Count The American Consumer Out

Despite the doomsday headlines surrounding tariff uncertainty, retail sales have climbed 3.6% through the first half of 2025 to total $4.2 trillion. While inflation inched up in June to 2.7% from 2.4% in May, it’s still below the first-half 2024 average of 3.3%. By contrast, inflation has averaged 2.6% from January to June 2025.

Notably, January to June 2024 retail sales rose 2.6% over 2023 – lagging behind inflation. That’s not the case in 2025, where retail growth has outpaced rising prices, underscoring consumer momentum and resilience.

“Consumers continue to spend in the face of uncertainty and shrugging off tariff concerns, with U.S. retail sales showing relative stability compared to last month and outpacing inflation compared to a year ago,” said Katie Thomas, Kearney Consumer Institute.

While many observers expect retail sales to slow as the year progresses after the full force of tariffs hit, American consumer resilience could defy expectations and keep retail going strong, making Coresight’s upside 3.5% fourth-quarter growth scenario a distinct possibility.