How to choose the right products for Prime Day deals

Prime Day can drive a surge of traffic and sales, but the most important decision happens before the event starts: which products you choose to put on deal.

Prime Day deal strategies should focus on product selection, not just discounts

For many teams, Prime Day product selection starts with a familiar shortlist: best sellers, hero SKUs, products with enough margin to support a discount, and items Amazon is already recommending for event participation. Those are all important inputs, and they can absolutely help drive volume. But the strongest Prime Day strategies go one step further by asking whether those same products are also likely to bring in shoppers who keep buying after the event is over.

If you want Prime Day to do more than spike sales for a few days, start with the products most likely to bring the most valuable shoppers into your brand.

To do that you have to look beyond top-line sales velocity using Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to identify the point of market entry (POME) ASINs. These products are typically thought of as the products that attract new shoppers, but we like to go one level deeper. With Flywheel's Consumer Long-Term Value (CLTV) dashboard, you can see which ASINs drive new-to-brand purchasers AND keep them coming back to purchase from your brand time and time again.

Why this matters now

Deal submission and promotional planning deadlines typically happen months in advance, which means the window to dig into your data and make product and investment decisions is now. The brands that win are the ones that decide early which products deserve deals, opening the door to smarter inventory and media investment planning.

Access to behavioral data informs more strategic product selections

Brands have long had access to new-to-brand product sales insights. What they have not always had is a clear view of what happens after that first purchase.

AMC’s five-year retail purchase lookback window changes that. Instead of just seeing which ASIN drove a new-to-brand purchases, brands can now understand what those shoppers did next, and what similar cohorts have done over time. Through Flywheel’s POME Report in the CLTV Dashboard, that means you can see which products bring in new shoppers, which ones lead to repeat purchases, and which ones are more likely to drive stronger long-term shopper value.

That is a major shift for Prime Day planning, which is often framed as a discounting exercise. What can you afford to mark down? What products do you expect to sell through? Which products are most likely to earn additional event visibility?

Those questions matter, but they should come after a more important one: which products are most likely to bring in shoppers who are worth acquiring?

Prime Day naturally attracts deal-seeking behavior. Some of those shoppers will be one-and-done buyers. Others will repurchase, subscribe, trade up, cross-shop into adjacent categories, or build larger baskets over time.

By looking at historical shopper behavior through the lens of long-term value, brands can get more specific about which products brought in lower-value deal seekers during past Prime Day events and which ones attracted shoppers who went on to buy again after the event.

That is where Flywheel’s CLTV Dashboard becomes especially useful. By isolating shoppers acquired during last year’s Prime Day dates in the dashboard and tracking what they did afterward, you can see which products drove only event-day conversion and which ones brought in shoppers with stronger long-term potential. That gives you a better foundation for both product selection and audience strategy heading into this year’s event.

Your best Prime Day deal product might not be your best seller

One of the biggest mistakes brands make is assuming the product with the highest ROAS, strongest sales, or broadest event appeal is automatically the right Prime Day deal product. Sometimes it is, but often it is not.

A stronger Prime Day strategy prioritizes ASINs that:

• bring in new-to-brand shoppers consistently

• lead to stronger repeat purchase behavior

• open the door to a broader portfolio journey

• can convert during a high-traffic event without depending on the deepest discount” 

For example, imagine a household cleaning brand choosing between a large refill bundle and a lower-priced starter kit. On the surface, the refill bundle may look like the better Prime Day product because it drives a higher average order value and stronger event-day return. But if your POME analysis shows that new shoppers overwhelmingly enter through the starter kit, and those shoppers later come back to buy refills, additional scents, or adjacent cleaning products, then the starter kit may be the better product to put on deal.

In that scenario, the starter kit is doing more than converting on Prime Day. It is bringing in shoppers who are likely to build value over time.

Once you choose the right products, make sure they are ready to win

Choosing the right products is the first step. Then those products need to be ready to convert. Before deals are submitted and locked in, pressure-test the basics:

• Is the PDP strong enough to convert new-to-brand shoppers once Prime Day traffic hits?

• Is the imagery clean and compliant?

• Are titles, bullets, and A+ content doing enough to communicate the product’s value quickly?

• Is the content structured clearly enough for both shoppers and AI-driven discovery experiences?

• Can inventory support the deal based on Amazon’s current PO timelines?

• Does the product meet the right discount and eligibility thresholds for the deal type you want to pursue?

That last point matters more than it sounds. Amazon’s various deal merchandising programs carry different discount requirements, so even if an ASIN is strategically right from a long-term value perspective, it still has to work operationally and financially within the deal structure.

This is also a good moment to use AMC beyond media planning. Shopper behavioral insights can help inform how you merchandise the event across PDPs, A+ content, and your Brand Store, so you are not treating every deal ASIN as a standalone conversion moment. Used well, those insights can shape how products are positioned within the broader shopping experience to support stronger long-term value.

How to put the right products in front of the right shoppers

Once your product selections are locked in, the next step is making sure those products reach shoppers who are more likely to turn into long-term customers. This is where AMC Audiences built on CLTV insights can help you get more precise.

Using AMC Audiences across your Amazon DSP and Sponsored Ads strategy, brands can move beyond broad Prime Day reach and start focusing media around the shoppers whose behaviors look more like their highest-value buyers. That might mean building lookalike audiences based on frequent shoppers, high-value shoppers, or promising new-to-brand cohorts, then using those audiences to support the products most likely to drive long-term value.

It also helps keep Prime Day from becoming a pure deal-seeker acquisition play. Prime Day will always drive urgency and promotional behavior, but brands can be more intentional about which shoppers they prioritize and which products they put in front of them.

The smartest Prime Day strategies improve with every event

It is easy to repeat the same product selection logic across tentpole events without learning enough from what happened before.

When you use POME report and CLTV insights to shape which products go on deal, then measure what those shoppers actually do after the event, you create a smarter planning loop. You can see which ASINs brought in high-value shoppers, which ones drove weaker downstream performance, and which ones deserve more or less event support next time.

Over time, that helps brands move from a rinse-and-repeat tentpole strategy to a more proactive one. The product selection gets better. The audience strategy gets better. The outcomes get better.

Prime Day starts before the event page goes live

The most important Prime Day decisions are not made during the event. They are made now, while there is still time to choose the right products, build the right offer strategy, and support those products with the inventory, content, and audiences they need.

Before your team submits deals, take a step back and ask whether your shortlist is based on habit or on shopper value. If it is just a list of high-volume products, you may be missing the bigger opportunity. If you’re looking to build a strategy grounded in POME and CLTV insights that drives effective new-to-brand growth, let’s connect.