An earlier Prime Day is bringing new forecasting and fulfillment challenges for brands that participate in the annual summer sales event. In March, news broke that Prime Day would be held in June instead of the typical mid-July timing. But it wasn’t until last week that Amazon confirmed the dates of June 23-26.
Mark Becker is the president, CEO and co-founder of G10 Fulfillment, which specializes in Amazon fulfillment and 2-day shipping. He said that the date change wasn’t easy for some brands and manufacturers because they’d already started planning forecasts months ago.
“We’ve all done our planning that it was going to be for July,” he said. “So when we finally found out it was moved up, it was a scramble from all the manufacturers we work with to get us product in time.”
The amount of product that moves around for Prime Day is no small lift: Based on Amazon’s 2022 data, shoppers bought 100,000 items per minute. More recently, the first-ever four-day Prime Day held last July saw record sales and revenue.
Moving to June, then, meant brands had to bring high volumes of inventory to their warehouses earlier than planned. Becker said this could mean higher costs to expedite shipping schedules, as well as hiring more temps to unload containers at the ports in time.
