Prime Time for Everyone: How Merchants Can Ride the Prime Week Wave

Amazon Prime Day 2026 is here, and it’s bigger, earlier and more commercially significant than ever. Running June 23–26, this year’s four-day event arrives in June for the first time since 2021, a deliberate move by Amazon to capture consumer spending before summer competition heats up. With an estimated 201 million US Prime members and Amazon’s online stores business posting 15% unit growth in Q1 2026, its strongest rate since the COVID stay-home period, the momentum heading into this event is significant.

But the real story isn’t just Amazon’s. Last year, shoppers spent more than $24 billion across all US retail websites during Prime Week’s four days, a 30% year-over-year increase. That figure includes the halo effect: the billions spent at every merchant, marketplace and retailer that benefited from the surge in shopper intent. Prime Day is no longer Amazon’s moment. It’s commerce’s moment.

For SaaS platforms and payment providers, the window to help merchants capitalize on that surge just got wider. The question is whether you have the tools to make the most of it.

What started as a single-day birthday celebration for Amazon Prime members has evolved into the top shopping event of the year. Drive Research’s 2025 Holiday Shopping Report confirms the shift: for the first time, more consumers say Prime Day offers the best deals of the year (27%) than online Black Friday (25%). The holiday shopping season no longer starts in November. It starts in June.

And Amazon is not the only winner. In 2025, 49% of Prime Day shoppers also shopped the Walmart Deals event, 35% shopped Target Circle Week and 11% shopped Best Buy’s Black Friday in July. This year, with Prime Day shifting to June, analysts expect competing retailers to move their own summer sales events earlier to match. For independent merchants, that creates a longer promotional runway and a larger audience primed to spend.

Participation is also growing. 55% of consumers plan to shop Prime Day 2026, up from 45% in 2025, and two-thirds expect to spend the same or more than last year. That is a meaningful increase in the addressable audience for every merchant competing for attention this week.

But there is an important consumer reality to hold alongside those numbers. Two-thirds of consumers say they plan to cut back on spending overall due to rising prices, according to The Conference Board. Shoppers aren’t spending freely. They’re spending selectively, concentrating their budgets around major sales events precisely because those events offer perceived relief from everyday price pressure. That means Prime Week captures concentrated, high-intent spending, but only for merchants that give shoppers the frictionless, value-driven experience they’re looking for.

1. Create Limited-Time Bundles and Exclusive Offers

Amazon has scale, but smaller sellers compete with creativity. Encourage merchants to build exclusive product bundles that deliver added value rather than deeper discounts. This keeps margins healthy while offering something Amazon cannot replicate. Omnia Retail’s analysis of Prime Day 2025 found that 45.5% of discounted Amazon products were actually priced higher during the event than in the week before it. Value-conscious shoppers notice, and merchants that offer genuine, transparent deals earn the loyalty that Amazon’s algorithm cannot manufacture.

NMI’s research reinforces the power of this approach. A majority of consumers (57%) say they’re more likely to make a purchase when personalized rewards or promo codes are offered to them. That rises to 70% for Baby Boomers and 66% for Gen X, showing that personalized promotions drive conversion across every age group, not just younger shoppers. For Millennial parents, a core Prime Day demographic, the numbers are even more pointed: 87% say the best shopping experiences are the ones where they can pay and leave quickly, and 80% wish retailers offered more time-saving perks like digital wallet acceptance and tech to skip lines. Deal messaging backed by a checkout experience that’s fast, simple and easy to redeem is how merchants turn Prime Week traffic into real revenue.

2. Match Amazon’s Speed with Frictionless Checkout

Amazon’s checkout sets a high bar, but the gap is closeable. Our research shows that 50% of consumers abandon their carts when the checkout process feels complicated or frustrating. At the same time, 48% say they spend more at checkout when the process is fast and frictionless. Speed doesn’t just reduce abandonment. It raises average order value.

That dynamic intensifies for younger shoppers. 37% of Gen Z admit they have spent more at checkout without realizing it because the process was so fast. And 52% of consumers overall say they prefer a secure, one-click online checkout over a slower interaction with a human cashier. For busy parents, that preference climbs to 61%.

Yet the gap between consumer expectation and merchant reality remains wide. 40% of small and medium-sized businesses still do not accept digital wallets, and nearly half lack an ecommerce presence altogether. During a four-day event where shopper intent is at its peak, that gap costs real revenue.

Tools like NMI Customer Vault, Automatic Card Updater and digital wallet integrations (Apple Pay, Google Pay and more) make it possible to offer:

• Stored payment methods for faster return visits
• Automatic card updates that remove a common abandonment trigger
• Recurring billing for subscription or membership models
• Low-friction checkout across every channel

3. Capture the Consumers Looking Beyond Amazon

Here is a number that should reframe how merchants think about Prime Week: more than half of consumers now plan to shop with multiple retailers during Prime Day, including Walmart and Target. Amazon’s grip on the event is loosening even as its total sales grow. Shoppers are using Prime Day as a trigger to buy, not a mandate to buy only from Amazon.

NMI’s research shows that 29% of Gen Z consumers now prefer digital wallets for both in-store and online purchases. This group moves fluidly across channels, researching online, discovering through social, and completing purchases wherever the experience is fastest. They do not distinguish between online and offline. It is all commerce.

For payment providers and SaaS platforms, meeting that expectation means:

• Supporting omnichannel payment flows that unify the customer journey across web, app, social and brick-and-mortar
• Enabling Tap to Pay and mobile-first in-store checkout to capture shoppers who arrive in person
• Offering integrated solutions that combine payment acceptance, rewards and customer data in one seamless experience
• Building plug-and-play functionality so merchants can activate these tools without a development team

The checkout experience shapes purchasing decisions well before a customer reaches the cart. NMI research finds that 75% of consumers say long payment lines make them less likely to make a purchase, while 80% say easy payment options make them more likely to buy. For merchants with a physical presence, in-store payment speed matters just as much as online conversion rates. With NMI’s embedded payments platform, you can give merchants the tools to sell across every channel and capture every sale, wherever and however customers choose to pay.

4. Optimize for AI-Driven Shoppers

The AI transformation of shopping is no longer a trend to watch. It is a competitive condition to respond to now. For Prime Day 2026, Amazon has rolled Rufus into a new offering called Alexa for Shopping, building personalized Deals Guides and setting deal alerts ahead of the event. The scale of that investment is significant: Rufus alone generated an estimated $12 billion in incremental gross merchandise value for Amazon in Q4 2025, according to Bank of America analysts. Bank of America projects Alexa for Shopping could power $215 billion in incremental gross sales for Amazon by 2035.

Amazon is not the only one building in this space. Google, OpenAI, Walmart and others are all developing AI shopping agents, competing to become the starting point for product discovery. The channel is shifting.

Drive Research’s 2025 Holiday Shopping Report confirms how quickly this is becoming a mainstream consumer behavior. Nearly 60% of consumers say they would use AI to find the lowest prices across multiple sites, and roughly half would use it to track price drops and coupons. One in ten consumers already discover shopping deals through AI tools.

For merchants, this has a practical implication: your pricing, promotions and product information need to be structured and visible enough to surface in AI-driven searches and deal summaries. For SaaS platforms, it means the checkout experiences you power should be fast, transparent and data-rich enough to build the kind of merchant credibility that AI recommendation tools reward. Merchants that are invisible to AI-powered shoppers during Prime Week are losing traffic they will never see.

Beyond the four days of the event, the structural shifts driving Prime Week’s growth are reshaping how consumers relate to spending year-round. NMI’s research shows that half of consumers say money feels less real when paying digitally. Among Gen Z, that number rises to 68%. Frictionless checkout is changing not just how often people spend, but how much they spend without noticing, with 48% saying they spend more when checkout is fast.

That’s both an opportunity and a responsibility. 88% of consumers say teaching financial literacy has never been more critical in a world of digital payments, and a growing share of shoppers are actively seeking tools that give them visibility and control alongside convenience. The platforms that win long-term will deliver both: seamless checkout and the transparency tools that build lasting trust.

As eMarketer analyst Sky Canaves noted, Prime Day’s power comes from its role as “a source of relief from the constant stress of rising prices.” Merchants and platforms that deliver on that promise, through genuine value, fast checkout and experiences that respect the customer’s time and money, will earn share that outlasts the event.

Prime Week is not just Amazon’s big moment. It is your merchants’ opportunity too. With the right embedded payment tools, sales enablement strategies and marketing support, you can empower them to capitalize on concentrated shopper intent, drive conversion and build lasting loyalty.

NMI gives SaaS platforms, software vendors and payment providers everything needed to unlock that value:

• Embedded payment flows for ecommerce, in-app and point-of-sale
• Tokenized card storage and secure transaction processing
• Tools to power rewards, recurring billing and seamless user experiences
• Omnichannel acceptance across online, in-store, mobile and unattended environments

Let’s Make Prime Week Your Best Yet

Want to help your merchants win this Prime Week and beyond? Reach out to NMI to see how our flexible, modular, embedded payments platform can turn seasonal spikes into long-term growth.