Retail’s most significant events revealed a hard truth: promotions can’t convert demand without inventory—lessons for 2026 inside.
With 2026 planning underway, lessons from the most significant retail events of 2025 are landing at the exact moment for brands to act on them in the New Year.
Prime Day may have broken records on paper — $24.1 billion in U.S. online sales across the event’s first-ever four-day run — but this extended timeframe also changed how people shopped. Instead of a predictable Day 1 rush, buying activity spread unevenly across the event. Those surges hit at moments when promotions were already live, pushing demand into inventory positions that sellers hadn’t prepared to support.
The Turkey 5 weekend reinforced the same lesson, but on an even larger scale. While Black Friday and Cyber Monday still captured the biggest share of sales, accounting for 54% of event revenue, demand spread meaningfully beyond the traditional headliners. Nearly half of all sales occurred on Thanksgiving Day, Small Business Saturday, Sunday, and the surrounding fringe days, forcing brands to support elevated demand across a longer, less predictable window.
As retailers map out their 2026 strategies, a look back at these 2025 sales events offers a preview of what will separate brands that grow from brands that scramble in 2026. The differentiator won’t be who runs the cleverest or steepest promotions; instead, platforms like Amazon and Walmart will continue to reward those with the operational stability to convert demand whenever it actually materializes.
What Happened During Prime Day 2025?
Retailers knew Prime Day was expanding to four days, but few anticipated how unevenly demand would materialize. Data showed that Day 2 became the heavier lift, with ordered revenue rising to 165% above baseline, compared to 154% on Day 1, reversing the usual Day 1-led pattern. This rebalancing shifted more traffic and conversion pressure into periods that many sellers hadn’t previously modeled.
Brands that anchored their deals to the expected Day-1 spike spent early, discounted aggressively, and pushed traffic when inventory was still healthy. But when shoppers shifted their actual buying behavior to the middle and end of the event, those same promotions began driving demand into thinner stock positions. Instead of accelerating sell-through, the shift accelerated revenue loss from OOS, which climbed 44% YoY, with Day-1 OOS losses alone jumping 74% YoY.
At the same time, the promotional and media landscape became increasingly competitive. CPCs surged 28% YoY on average, pushing ad dollars into a more expensive auction environment just as glance views softened 20% YoY. With weaker visibility and rising costs, SKUs drifting toward OOS were more quickly suppressed in ranking and placements, meaning paid traffic and deal traffic were routed to competing sellers or substitutes, regardless of how competitive the discount was.
What Happened During Turkey 5 2025?
Across the five days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, U.S. online sales reached approximately $44.2 billion, up roughly 7.7% YoY, indicating strong overall demand but also revealing where that demand landed throughout the period.
Rather than one or two days dominating demand, shoppers spread purchases across the entire window, making it harder for brands to time promotions and stock appropriately. Black Friday itself reached record levels, with online sales totaling around $11.8 billion, representing a 9% increase from 2024. Meanwhile, Cyber Monday clocked in at nearly $14.2 billion, maintaining its status as the single biggest online shopping day of the season. Thanksgiving Day also made waves, with approximately $6.4 billion in online purchases, indicating that meaningful conversion pressure now arrives before Black Friday even begins.
While traditional days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday still matter most, nearly half of Turkey 5 revenue now comes from fringe days around them, amplifying the importance of inventory and visibility across all peak moments rather than just headline dates.
Why Discounting Can’t Solve Inventory Problems
When sales momentum slows, or competition intensifies, the default response for many brands is to lean harder on promotional pricing: drop the price by another 5%, stack a coupon on top of a Prime Exclusive Discount, or increase ad spend to drive more traffic to the deal. It’s a reflex that treats every performance problem as a pricing problem.
But the 2025 holiday season demonstrated exactly why this reflex to treat every performance issue as a pricing problem is dangerous. Promotional pricing can generate clicks and add-to-cart activity, but it can’t manufacture conversions when products simply aren’t available to ship.
The mechanics break down at the point of transaction, with consequences extending well beyond a single missed sale:
- Margin erosion without volume gains: Brands that run promotions without inventory depth burn margin on limited units. The discount may move some products, but not enough to justify the profitability hit — and certainly not enough to offset the conversions that flowed elsewhere.
- Algorithm suppression: Amazon’s systems track stock levels and penalize low inventory scores with reduced visibility. Products flagged as understocked get deprioritized in search and lose eligibility for promotional placements, even if they haven’t fully stocked out. In other words, a 30% discount doesn’t matter when the listing is buried on page three.
- Competitor capture that’s hard to win back: The downstream effects show up after the event. Shoppers who pivot to an in-stock competitor during a promotion complete their purchase and move on. Winning them back requires another promotional cycle, more media spend, and no guarantee of switching.
All of this means a single availability miss is rarely isolated. It compounds into a prolonged share deficit as competitors inherit demand, strengthen their rank, and widen the gap. Brands that assume a stockout only costs the missed sale are underestimating the true impact by a factor of ten.
How Brands Can Build Promotion Strategies that Don’t Collapse Under Demand Shifts
As brands look toward 2026, here are some strategies that can help maintain stability when demand intensifies or shifts unexpectedly.
Build promotions around what inventory could actually support
Across marketplaces, the same principle holds: algorithms reward SKUs that stay in stock. Sellers who focus on maintaining high in-stock rates are better positioned to preserve rank, Buy Box share, and conversion momentum, even with lighter discounts.
So, instead of starting with, “What should we discount?” ask instead, “What can we reliably keep in stock across the entire event?” Products with uncertain inbound shipments, tight lead times, or historical volatility should never make it onto the promotional calendar, even if they are strong performers.
Takeaway: Promotions shouldn’t outrun availability. Filtering deals through inventory reliability first prevents the scenario where a discount accelerates the very stockout that derails performance.
Align media spend with real-time stock signals
In long events with unpredictable surges, fixed media plans tend to backfire. So, consider using guardrails that pull back spend when coverage is tightened to avoid wasted impressions and higher CPCs on SKUs drifting toward stockout or losing Buy Box eligibility.
Takeaway: Rather than anchoring media to the calendar, align it to inventory health. AI tools built for Amazon selling can automatically adjust spend based on availability, protecting ROAS and keeping budgets focused on SKUs that actually convert.
Structure promotions to avoid demand spikes you can’t sustain
Instead of front-loading the most aggressive discounts at the start of major sales events, strategies like tiered discounting, 48-hour deal windows, and staggered offers can keep demand from clustering into narrow, uncontrollable spikes. This reduces the odds of sudden stockouts during the highest-traffic periods and keeps SKUs algorithmically stable throughout the event.
Takeaway: The goal in long events isn’t to create isolated peaks, but to maintain controlled lift. Evenly distributed promotions protect availability and visibility over the full window.
2025’s major retail events exposed an old problem retailers have been papering over with discounts for years: you can stimulate demand with promotions, but you can’t convert it without availability. And in a marketplace where algorithms reward consistency, every stockout now casts a longer, more expensive shadow.
