Written by Julien Ricciarelli-Bonnal
10 October 2026
The Essentials
Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days on October 6 and 7 helped push online sales across U.S. retailers to $9.86 billion in just two days. Even more revealing, more than a third of participating shoppers said they had already completed at least half of their holiday shopping during the event. Amazon is therefore doing more than creating another promotional period before Christmas. It is helping move the point at which demand begins. Black Friday remains a major retail event, but it is gradually losing its position as the unquestioned starting line of the holiday season. For brands, Christmas shopping increasingly begins much earlier.
For years, the holiday retail calendar appeared relatively easy to understand. Brands spent the autumn building inventory and preparing campaigns, Black Friday opened the major promotional period, and December carried the final rush into Christmas. Reality was always more complicated than that neat sequence suggests, but the structure gave retailers, brands and consumers a set of powerful commercial reference points.
Amazon is steadily changing that structure. October’s Prime Big Deal Days are no longer simply another sale inserted between the back-to-school period and Black Friday. According to Retail Dive, online spending across U.S. retailers reached $9.86 billion during the event’s two-day window on October 6 and 7. That figure is not Amazon’s own sales, an important distinction that actually makes the trend more significant. An event created by one retailer has become large enough to affect the rhythm of a much broader part of the U.S. online retail market.
Amazon’s real power may be deciding when the market starts buying
The most interesting signal from this year’s event is not simply the amount of money spent. More than a third of Prime Big Deal Days shoppers said they completed at least half of their holiday shopping during the sale. At the same time, stated intention to shop on Black Friday and Cyber Monday fell by four and five percentage points respectively compared with the previous year’s event. November is not becoming irrelevant, but some of the money that might once have waited for Black Friday is clearly being activated earlier.
That represents a meaningful change in commercial power. A conventional promotion tries to capture demand that already exists. Amazon is increasingly able to do something more ambitious: create a date important enough to move purchase decisions forward and force competitors to respond around it. Half of Prime Big Deal Days shoppers compared Amazon’s prices with other retailers. Amazon does not therefore need to capture every transaction itself in order to shape the market. If its event becomes the moment when customers begin seriously comparing products, budgets and offers, it has already influenced the timing of the purchase.
This is one of the less obvious forms of platform power. Large digital businesses do not only influence prices, distribution or product visibility. They can also influence commercial time. When Amazon creates an event strong enough for Walmart, Target and other retailers to adjust their own promotional activity around the same dates, it is no longer simply participating in the retail calendar. It is helping write it.
Black Friday is not disappearing, but it no longer owns urgency
It would be premature to announce the death of Black Friday. Consumers will still wait for major discounts in certain categories, November will continue to produce enormous volumes of spending and the proximity of Christmas will naturally generate urgency. What is weakening is the assumption that the holiday buying season truly begins at the end of November.
The broader pattern makes this particularly interesting. Amazon also moved its main 2026 Prime Day event into June, creating another major spending moment outside the traditional retail calendar. E-commerce is gradually becoming less dependent on inherited shopping occasions and more influenced by events that platforms create themselves. A date that once meant almost nothing commercially can acquire enormous value once consumers learn to expect deals, retailers prepare inventory for it and competitors feel compelled to respond.
For shoppers, that can look like a welcome increase in opportunities to save money. For brands, it creates a much harder planning environment. A sale in October can now capture spending that was originally intended for Christmas. A company that waits until November to become aggressive may discover that part of its audience has already spent its discretionary budget. Timing is no longer simply a communications decision. It is becoming part of commercial strategy.
Preparing for Christmas in November is becoming increasingly late
Inventory is the most obvious consequence. If meaningful holiday demand now arrives in October, products need to be available sooner, forecasting needs to accommodate additional peaks and logistics operations must be ready to absorb several waves of demand rather than one dominant period. A company can execute an excellent Black Friday campaign and still underperform across the season because customers began buying six weeks earlier than its planning assumed.
The same change applies to media budgets, CRM, product launches and content. Campaigns that once nurtured interest gradually throughout autumn may now need to convert customers much earlier. Brands also have to decide which promotional moments deserve investment without spreading discounts so widely that margins deteriorate for an entire quarter. This is where the changing calendar becomes a matter of marketing strategy rather than campaign execution. Choosing when to compete can become as important as deciding what to say or which channel to use.
It also changes how performance should be interpreted. A weaker Black Friday may eventually indicate that demand has shifted rather than disappeared. Equally, a spectacular October event may simply bring forward purchases that would otherwise have happened in November. Sales data needs to be read across the entire season rather than judged date by date, because consumer timing is becoming increasingly fluid.
Starting earlier does not mean discounting for three months
The dangerous conclusion would be that every brand should now enter permanent promotional mode from early October onwards. If retailers respond to the longer season simply by adding more discounts, they risk teaching customers that the displayed price is rarely the price they should actually pay. Buying then becomes a question not only of need or desire, but of predicting the next promotion.
Pricing technology is already making these decisions more sophisticated. The recent example of McDonald’s using a machine-learning pricing engine to estimate local willingness to pay illustrates how dynamic price strategy is becoming. But the ability to optimise more commercial moments does not mean a brand should participate in every one of them. Constant promotional presence may increase short-term revenue while gradually weakening confidence in ordinary pricing.
The strategic challenge is therefore not to start Christmas as early as possible. It is to understand how customers now distribute their purchases across a longer commercial window. Some brands will benefit from competing aggressively in October. Others may preserve their strongest offers for November or December. Premium businesses may decide that avoiding the discount race altogether protects more value than joining it. The appropriate choice depends on margin structure, category dynamics, positioning and how customers actually behave.
The holiday season is becoming a commercial corridor rather than a series of dates
Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas will continue to matter, but they increasingly sit inside a much longer period in which the boundaries between shopping events are becoming less clear. A customer can begin gift buying in October, make additional purchases in November and finish in December, moving between platforms and retailers whenever the perceived value is attractive enough.
For businesses, this means treating the holiday period as a journey rather than a collection of isolated campaigns. They need to decide when to generate interest, when to trigger conversion, when to defend margin and when to recognise that some demand has already been captured. Holiday performance will depend less on winning one spectacular weekend and more on managing the entire season coherently.
Amazon’s achievement is ultimately larger than a successful promotional event. Prime Big Deal Days matter not because early October naturally possesses extraordinary retail value, but because Amazon has taught millions of customers to treat it as a buying occasion and pushed competitors to organise themselves around it.
The next holiday battle will therefore not be fought only over price, discounts or visibility. It will also be fought over something brands once treated as fixed: the moment when customers decide to buy.
If changing customer behaviour is forcing your company to reconsider its marketing calendar, positioning or commercial priorities, we can discuss it.
Written by Julien Ricciarelli-Bonnal
10 October 2026
