One setting can quietly kill your Prime Day.
The pre-flight checklist — 12 things to confirm before the 23rd.
📆 Wednesday, 17 Jun 2026
Hey — It’s Rhythm. Thrilled to have you back in Ecom Circle, where I spend my time scaling ecom brands & finding best growth strategies to share with you.
Prime Day runs June 23–26, just a week more to go. The big prep is behind you. Deals submitted, inventory shipped, campaigns built. If you wanted a Prime Day strategy, you needed it three weeks ago.
What’s left is the run-up — the part where you make sure none of that hard work gets quietly undone by a detail you didn’t check. The deal that never got approved. The budget that runs out by lunchtime. The listing that’s one bad setting away from invisible.
So this isn’t a strategy guide. It’s a pre-flight checklist — the i’s to dot and t’s to cross between now and the 23rd. Twelve things, in three parts: what to double-check, what’s still worth doing this week, and how to not waste the momentum once it starts.
Let’s get into it.
PART 1 — Verify it didn’t quietly break
Most of this is already done. Your only job this week is to confirm it’s still standing.
Ensure That Listings Aren’t Suppressed
A listing can get quietly pulled over something small — a missing detail, a flagged image — and Amazon won’t tell you it happened.
A hidden product on the busiest day of the year is the most expensive thing on this list. Confirm your key products are live and showing.
One trap to sidestep while you’re in there: don’t change your listings this week. Editing the main image, title, or copy this close can trigger a re-check that pulls the listing down temporarily — right when you need it up.
The urge to polish before the big day is the wrong move. Confirm, don’t rebuild.
Tidy Up Your Reviews And Questions
A fresh one-star review or an ignored question at the top of your page quickly talks shoppers out of buying — and it does the most damage right when traffic spikes.
Answer any open questions. Immediately reach out to recent poor reviews for reconciliation. In fact, an updated review that highlights you solving the issue works wonders in your favor.
Make Sure Your Deal Looks Like A Deal
When you run a deal, Amazon shows your old price crossed out with a “Save X%” badge. That crossed-out number does a lot of the selling.
Here’s the catch: Amazon now factors in the discounts you ran earlier this year when it works out your “regular” price — which quietly drags it down. So a deal that showed a fat crossed-out price last year might show a small one now. Or none at all.
Same price, weaker pull.
Open your listing and confirm the crossed-out price and savings badge are actually there. If they’re missing, your discount may need to go deeper to win the badge back.
👉 Want to see what a shopper actually sees on your listings? Reply “CHECK“ with your store link and we’ll look at them the way a buyer does on a phone — and flag what’s off before the 23rd: a product that isn’t showing, another seller winning the sale on your own listing, a bad review sitting right up top.
If we spot something that needs a look inside your account, we’ll tell you. We can only turn around a few this week, so first come.
PART 2 — Still worth doing this week
These are the levers still in your hands. None need a big budget — just the right moves, in the right order.
Back Your Winners
Don’t spread spend evenly across the catalogue.
Put it behind proven sellers and products that are genuinely ready — good images, real reviews, a strong offer, plenty of inventory. Watch the ones that aren’t moving; if they’re eating budget without sales, pull back fast.
Prime Day clicks are the most expensive of the year. Don’t waste them on products that can’t close.
Spend By The Hour
People browse in the morning and buy at night.
A budget that runs flat across 24 hours burns through the slow morning hours and risks running dry before the evening rush — when the actual buying happens. Spend less early, protect the evening.
And remember it’s a four-day event: a budget that taps out by lunchtime on day one misses three and a half days of peak.
Add A Prime-Member Discount
They carry the “Prime Day Deal” badge, cost very little, run all day, and can still be tweaked up to a few hours before the event ends.
That’s actually a big deal if you’ve missed out on approved deals. You can still set up these discounts right now.
For most brands, they beat the bigger, pricier deal types on return. If you’ve got room for one more lever this week, this is the one.
Make A Prime Day Deals Page On Your Storefront
You want your Prime Day creative in front of shoppers — but remember the rule from Part 1: don’t touch the product page this week.
So put it somewhere safe instead. Build a “Prime Day Deals” page on your store and point your ads at it.
That’s where your event imagery and bundles can live with zero risk of getting a listing pulled right before the event.
Prime Day Is A Great Time For New Launches
A burst of sales during the event tells Amazon a product is in demand — doing in 48 hours what normally takes months of spend to build.
If you’ve got something new waiting in the wings, this is the cheapest launch window you’ll get all year. Point some traffic at it.
Poach Your Rivals’ Shoppers
You can put your ads in front of people viewing competing products.
Prime Day is when undecided shoppers compare options side by side — the best moment of the year to win a look from someone about to buy elsewhere.
Also keep in mind that this can happen with you too - so defend your listings with SD ads.
👉 The hour-by-hour budget split is the thing most teams get wrong. Reply “PRIME“ and we’ll send you the exact time-of-day budget template we use during the event — yours to copy.
PART 3 — Don’t let the momentum leak
The event ends on the 26th. The opportunity doesn’t. This is where a lot of money gets left on the table.
Don’t Go Quiet On The 27th
The most common mistake, and the most expensive.
The sales boost from Prime Day keeps lifting where you show up in search for one to two weeks after it ends. Cut spend the moment the event closes and you hand back the ground you just paid for.
Hold most of your budget for a week if you can, then ease it down. The returns often keep coming in the two weeks after the event.
Catch The Review Wave
Prime Day brings more orders in a few days than most brands see in a month — a flood of customers you can ask for reviews.
Reviews you gather right after the event compound into better ranking for the rest of the year. Almost nobody has a plan to capture them. Have one ready before the 23rd.
Bank Buyers For Black Friday
The customers you just won are the warmest audience you’ll have going into Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Save them now — into a follow-up offer, a subscription, a list you can advertise to again — and you head into Q4 with a running start instead of paying to find cold traffic all over again.
Prime Day’s biggest payoff isn’t July revenue. It’s a Q4 audience you already own.
👉 Most brands waste the customers they just won. Reply “BFCM“ and we’ll send you our post-Prime Day plan — how to ease ads down without giving back the ground you bought, and how to turn these new buyers into your Black Friday base.
The week before is cheap insurance
None of this is heavy lifting. It’s the difference between months of prep that pay off and months of prep undone by one setting nobody checked.
One week of work, spread across these twelve, protects everything you’ve already put in. Most of it you can do yourself — and you should, starting today.
But a few of the costliest problems are the ones you can’t see from the outside: a listing that’s been quietly suppressed, ad budget leaking into the wrong hours, a deal that won’t fire when the clock strikes. Those live inside your account.
That’s what our live audit is for. We go through your account with you, run it against this whole checklist, and hand you a prioritised fix list — what’s exposed, what to fix first, ranked by impact. No drawn-out discovery call. Just a clear read before Prime Day opens. Open to any Amazon brand.
We’ve got 4 audit slots left before the 23rd — and they go fast this close to the event.
[Grab your free Prime Day audit →]
P.S. There’s hardly any time left. If you want us to look, reply or grab a slot today or tomorrow — any later and there isn’t enough runway to fix what we find before Prime Day opens. Click here to book your free Prime Day audit now!