Welcome to The Ecommerce Braintrust podcast, brought to you by Julie Spear, Head of Retail Marketplace Services, and Jordan Ripley, Director of Retail Account Management.

We recorded this episode on June 29th, 2026, just after the dust had settled on Amazon Prime Day 2026. The initial numbers are starting to normalize, and we have brought together a great panel of internal experts to help us unpack exactly what went down.

Joining us to break down the event from all angles, we have:

Ross Walker, Director of Retail Media, will walk us through the media side
Michael Childers, Retail Account Manager, covering account strategy
Meg Scavo, Senior Account Manager, digging into the data from the disruptor and challenger brands we manage

Let's jump right into it.

"If you don't run any deals, you might be down year over year. With all the filtering and AI tools, people are going straight to deals in search, so you won't get visibility."

-Meg Scavo

KEY TAKEAWAYS

In this episode, Julie, Jordan, Ross, Michael, and Meg discuss:

Prime Day 2026 delivered strong growth. Spend was up ~23% YoY for Acadia clients, ahead of expectations, but performance increasingly came down to execution-promotion depth, media strategy, and catalog focus-not just participation.
The sales curve flattened across all four days. Days 2 and 3 saw the strongest growth, and the classic "Day 1 spike + Day 4 finale" pattern weakened. Consumers are pacing purchases more deliberately, while Amazon's merchandising is actively shaping that flow.
Participation is effectively mandatory now. Roughly 9 in 10 brands ran promotions. Opting out no longer just forfeits upside-it can actively hurt visibility, as the traditional halo effect continues to fade.
Promotions have converged into a more disciplined playbook. Prime Exclusive Discounts dominate, with brands shifting from broad discounting to tiered strategies-heavier discounts on hero ASINs (30–40%), lighter elsewhere (15–20%)-balancing rank defense with margin control.
Incrementality looks weaker, but it's largely a baseline shift. June timing created a "higher floor," making lift look smaller than prior years. Absolute growth is still strong, but comparisons to past Prime Days are less apples-to-apples.
AI is becoming the infrastructure layer of shopping. Discovery, PDP content, reviews, and Q&A now directly influence how products are surfaced and summarized, meaning content quality and structure are now performance levers, not just hygiene.
Media is still essential, but less about scale and more about precision. Ad spend rose ~24%, but conversion declined through the event as shoppers shifted into comparison mode. Sponsored prompts drove big engagement, but performance varied sharply by funnel depth-strong in lower-funnel use cases, weak in top-funnel browsing.
Bottom line: Prime Day is shifting from a discount-driven event to a visibility-and-optimization exercise-where winners are defined less by how much they discount and more by how well they manage structure, media efficiency, and AI-era discoverability.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Connect with Senior Account Manager, Meg Scavo

Connect with Retail Marketplaces Account Manager, Michael Childers

Connect with Acadia's Director of Retail Media, Ross Walker

Connect with our host, Julie Spear

Connect with our host, Jordan Ripley

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