Don’t fall victim to the number 1 reason brands lose money on Prime Day
By Jasonlandro · June 22, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Don’t fall victim to the number 1 reason brands lose money on Prime Day
Most brands end up running large discounts and amplifying those discounts with ad spend and are in red without even knowing it
This happens all the time because brands, especially ones on Vendor Central, don’t have a way to measure SKU-level profitability
Instead, they analyze profit at the account level which is very misleading
You could have one product with a 33% contribution margin and another with a negative contribution margin, for example
If you promo your ASINs that have low profit or no profit, you can get in serious trouble quickly, not even including ad spend
If you sell a consumable product, it gets even more complicated because you need to look at customer lifetime value, not just contribution margin on a single sale
And you don’t want to incentivize consumers who already subscribe to shift their buying forward with a heavy discount when they would have already bought
For the P&L at an ASIN level, we use iDerive our analytics platform that measure each brand’s own contribution margin at the SKU level and then overlays that with sales, ads, and more
We even allocate ad spend to each ASIN
That enables us to devise strategies for high-visibility events like Prime Day that not only lead to growth but that are profitable
For the CLV, NTB, and subscription revenue measurement, we use custom-built reports from Amazon Marketing Cloud that we surface in iDerive so we (including our client partners) can see their customer lifetime value by ASIN, the revenue waterfall, NTB versus returning customer revenue, and so much more
Amazon makes so much data available, but that’s only half the equation
The other half is how you use that data to grow your business profitably
It’s not too late to make last-minute adjustments to your Prime Day strategy