Win Prime Day 2026: 5 priorities every seller should focus on now

In this webinar, Matt Tomaszewski (Head of North American Partnerships, ChannelEngine) joined Jason Rubenstein (Senior Partner Development Manager, Amazon) and Tom Werle (Chief Operating Officer, Jungle Scout) to break down what sellers need to know about Prime Day 2026, and where to focus their energy right now.

The result is one of the most grounded, practical Prime Day conversations you'll find - no hype, no vague advice, just a clear-eyed view of what's changed and what to do about it.

In a nutshell:

Prime Day 2026 is likely landing in late June. That means preparation time is already shrinking. The sellers who consistently outperform aren't the ones with the biggest budgets: they're the ones who started earlier, understood their category before touching their pricing, and built enough operational flexibility to handle the unexpected.

The five priorities: visibility, inventory, pricing, advertising, and operations. Each one is covered below.

What sellers said their biggest challenge is right now 

Before diving into the session, we asked the attendees: "What is your biggest challenge preparing for Prime Day this year?", and the results reflect exactly what's keeping sellers up at night heading into 2026. 

Nearly half of respondents pointed to pricing and margins as their number one concern, which makes sense given the current environment of rising FBA fees, tariff pressure, and tighter margins across the board. Ad budget efficiency and demand forecasting followed closely behind.

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Best practices and key learnings

1. Visibility: AI is changing how products get found on Amazon

For years, Amazon search was a relatively straightforward game: Optimise your keywords, run ads, rank higher. That's still part of the picture, but a meaningful new variable has entered the frame.

Amazon's AI shopping assistant, Rufus, is now handling around 13% of Amazon search, with 250 million shoppers having used it. And Rufus doesn't work like traditional search.

"We've all been taught search terms, keywords, and product-specific details. Rufus is now more optimised towards a conversation with a shopper. So it's not going to give 50 listings and organically rank them that way. It's going to give you 5 recommendations that are going to drive towards a conversation or conversion."

 

Jason Rubenstein
Sr. Partnership Development Manager at Amazon

That's a fundamental shift. Keyword stuffing, title cramming, and generic lifestyle images - none of that serves Rufus well. What does? Listings that actually answer questions. Informative images with clear text overlays. Strong review sentiment. Fully completed backend attributes.

Tom Werle added an important nuance:

“87% of searches that still run through traditional keywords give you real signals about what your category cares about. Use that demand data to inform your Rufus optimisation - they're not separate strategies.”

 

Tom Werle
Chief Operating Officer at JungleScout

The timing is critical. Rufus needs time to index your content before traffic starts hitting. If Prime Day is eight weeks out, the window to act is now. Sellers who make listing changes in the final days before the event will likely see those updates arrive too late to matter.

2. Inventory: plan for uncertainty, not just your best guess

Stock issues are the most common way Prime Day goes wrong. You do everything right on visibility and pricing, and then you run out of stock on day two.

The challenge is that Prime Day demand is inherently unpredictable. Last year, the event expanded from two to four days with relatively little warning. A competitor could go viral overnight. A brand placement you didn't know was coming could send 500x normal volume through your listings in an hour.

Jason's advice: Stop planning for a single scenario. "It's not planning for just one scenario. You're going to have a low, mid, and high demand case."

Factor in potential FBA inbound delays of up to a week and a half. Ship early, ideally now. If you're waiting for submission deadlines to trigger your inventory decisions, backlogs are likely already forming.

Tom added a useful framing for demand planning: 

“Use historical category data to set your goalposts. Year-over-year category growth, your pricing elasticity relative to competitors, and your share of voice versus market share all give you a tighter range of uncertainty to plan within. Categories like beauty, health and personal care, and toys have shown consistent growth across recent Prime Days. If you're in those categories, plan accordingly.”

 

Tom Werle
Chief Operating Officer at JungleScout

On the fulfillment side, Jason recommended thinking hybrid: FBA for speed and Prime eligibility, combined with a 3PL fallback or merchant-fulfilled option for overflow.

Amazon's Multi-Channel Fulfillment can also extend the same inventory pool to Shopify, Walmart, and TikTok, worth considering if you're selling across channels.

3. Pricing: competitive doesn't mean cheapest

Of all five priorities, pricing is the one sellers most often get wrong, either by being too reactive or by discounting without understanding whether the discount will actually drive volume.

Tom walked through Jungle Scout category data showing a striking example: One brand reduced its average selling price by 6% YoY and saw no meaningful revenue growth as a result. Something else was wrong: listing quality, review sentiment, competitive assortment, and discounting didn't fix it.

"You need to really understand where you sit competitively. It also starts to set the right targeting around ROAS. A lot of folks will just look at ROAS and not realise that, if you have pricing power, your ROAS is actually going to be a little bit lower because your conversion will be less, but your margins will be higher."

 

Tom Werle
Chief Operating Officer at JungleScout

The framework Tom recommends: Before you decide on a discounting strategy, understand your share of voice versus your market share. If your market share exceeds your share of voice, you have room to invest and capture more ground. If it's the other way around, you may be spending to defend a declining position, and a deeper discount probably won't change that.

"I just don't think every ASIN in your catalog belongs in the Prime Day event. I think you can just focus on promos with really healthy margins and strong conversion, and you'll get organic traffic from the rest."

 

Jason Rubenstein
Sr. Partnership Development Manager at Amazon

One more thing worth watching in 2026: Rising costs. FBA fees, fuel surcharges, and per-unit fees are all up. Jason was direct about this: model every promotion against the full fee stack before you commit. Discounting into a loss is a Prime Day outcome you want to avoid.

4. Advertising: spend smarter, not harder

Ad costs are up across the board on Amazon. Spending more doesn't guarantee better results. The sellers who get the best return from Prime Day advertising are those who've done the category and competitive work first, and then align their ad strategy to what they already know. 

The playbook in practice: Sponsored Products on your deal ASINs, Sponsored Brands for category-level searches, and Display for retargeting if budget allows. Keep it focused - the complexity of running everything at once during a high-volume event is where things go wrong.

Tom's data layer adds important context here. Jungle Scout tracks keyword-level demand and conversion across Amazon categories, and one pattern stands out: sellers often chase viral keywords that are already declining by the time they act.

The better approach is to identify sustainable themes of growth within your category, clusters of keywords that are growing consistently and converting well, rather than reacting to whatever's spiking right now.

5. Execution and operations: what breaks when volume spikes

Everything else on this list, visibility, inventory, pricing, and ads, depends on your operations holding up when it matters most. Prime Day is where manual processes get exposed.

The sellers who handle this well aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest teams. They're the ones who built their automation and rules-based processes before the event started, so when volume arrives, the system responds, not a person.

What that looks like in practice:

• Automated repricing with floor and ceiling rules in place before day one.
• Real-time inventory sync across FBA, 3PL, and every other sales channel.
• Alert thresholds that flag unusual spikes before they become stockouts or oversells.
• Deal and promotion management that doesn't require manual intervention mid-event.
  
  

Final thoughts

The common thread across all five priorities is timing. The sellers who win Prime Day start earlier than they think they need to, do more analytical work upfront than feels necessary, and build enough flexibility into their setup to handle good surprises, not just bad ones.

As Jason put it at the close of the session: "If you haven't started the plan yet, start today."

Tom's closing thought was equally direct: "Know your category, understand who you're taking share from, and set a goal."

Prime Day 2026 is not a one-day sprint. It's a window, and the preparation you do in the weeks before it is what determines how well you perform during it.

This post is based on the "Win Prime Day 2026" webinar featuring Jason Rubenstein (Amazon), Tom Werle (Jungle Scout), and Matt Tomaszewski (ChannelEngine), recorded May 12, 2026.