Which Prime Day deals generate long-term value?

Deal submissions are now open for this summer’s Prime Day. That means a lot of you are wrestling with the perennial question: which of your products should you submit for Prime Day deals? 

There are, of course, a bunch of factors to consider. On one hand, you want to submit products that have a high NTB rate or repeat purchase rate, so you can be sure that your shoppers aren’t just buying once on Prime Day and then dropping off. 

You also want to keep a close eye on your ASIN-level profitability, to be sure you aren’t taking significant losses on all of these Prime Day deals. 

That’s especially important if the products you put on your deals are not often repurchased. 

But one basic question about deal ASINs that too few brands are able to answer is this: Do they earn you profits in the long run? 

Put another way: Do the shoppers who buy your products on Prime Day actually become recurring customers long enough for you to make back your investment? 

Especially if you’re offering steep deals that involve light losses upfront, you want to be sure that the trade-off of deal ASINs is actually worth it. 

Choosing Prime Day deals with long-term value 

For a long time, the longevity of Prime Day shoppers was anyone’s guess. 

But new data sets inside AMC have made it possible to really understand, with multiple years of context, what shoppers are doing after they buy your products on Prime Day. 

With AMC’s 5-year lookback data in AMC, for instance, you can track shopper behavior across intervals of your choice: say, 6 months, 1 year, 3 years, 5 years. 

Ultimately, you can see how the lifetime value of your shoppers evolves at each of these intervals.

You can also segment these shoppers according to whether or not they first bought from you on a deal.

The 5-year lookback data set lets you run queries comparing the LTV of your Prime Day shoppers to the LTV of your non-Prime Day shoppers. 

Do Prime Day seem to just drop off, without making a lot of subsequent purchases? 

And does this vary a lot from ASIN to ASIN? 

The answers to these questions should inform a lot of your Prime Day strategy. If you notice that particular ASINs don’t seem to generate a lot of long-term customer value, then maybe they aren’t worth pushing on Prime Day.

And remember, this can sometimes be counterintuitive. You could sell through a ton of SKUs of a particular ASIN on Prime Day, but if those shoppers rarely buy future products from you, then that ASIN probably isn’t worth pushing. 

Intentwise’s platform supports seamless use of the 5-year lookback window in AMC. We also wrote an entire whitepaper on it, which you can download here, if you want to know more.

And if you want a live view of the LTV of your deal vs. non-deal shoppers, Intentwise can build that for you. 

Our team has created custom dashboards for clients that let you see the LTV of all of your past Prime Day shoppers—separated out by ASIN so you can see which deals actually pay for themselves in the long run.

Of course, LTV shouldn’t be the end-all-be-all of your Prime Day analysis. When deciding which ASINs to push on Prime Day and how much of a discount to offer, you want to also factor in the profit margins, NTB, Share of Voice, and Buy Box percentage.

All of these signals operate together to define success on marketplaces. And the way to understand the complicated relationships between these signals is to embrace Commerce Observability, a powerful system that braids all of your fragmented signals into a single architecture. 

You can no longer win on marketplaces if your catalog isn’t truly observable.