Amazon Big Deal Days 2026: What Sellers Need to Know Before October.

Amazon Big Deal Days is October's answer to Prime Day. Two days. Heavy discounts. A traffic spike that, for many categories, outperforms the summer Prime Day on conversion rate because shoppers arriving in October already have holiday shopping on their minds.

The problem most sellers run into is timing. The sale gets announced in September, and suddenly everyone is scrambling to build a strategy, adjust budgets, and figure out their automation settings. By the time that's done, the sale is already here.

This post covers what Big Deal Days is, why October matters more than most people realize, and what you should be setting up now that the October 6 and 7 dates are confirmed.

What Amazon Big Deal Days actually is

Amazon introduced Big Deal Days in 2022 as a fall counterpart to Prime Day. It runs for roughly two days in mid-October, open to Prime members, with Lightning Deals, steep brand discounts, and the full Prime Day promotional treatment.

Update, September 15, 2026: Amazon has now confirmed the dates. Prime Big Deal Days 2026 runs October 6 and 7, starting at 12:01 a.m. PT on Tuesday, October 6 and ending at 11:59 p.m. PT on Wednesday, October 7. It is a 48-hour event, exclusive to Prime members, spanning more than 35 categories. That is slightly earlier than the 2024 event, which ran October 8 and 9.

Now that the dates are fixed, the prep in this post has a deadline attached to it. For the full three-phase version, covering what to ramp in the weeks before, how to bid and budget across the 48 hours, and what to run in the two weeks after, see the complete Prime Big Deal Days 2026 playbook.

In terms of scale: Big Deal Days does not hit the revenue numbers of summer Prime Day. But that framing misses the point. The goal of Big Deal Days for most sellers is not to generate peak revenue, it is to capture holiday shoppers early, before they have made brand decisions, and to carry that momentum into BFCM six weeks later.

Why October matters more than most sellers budget for

The conventional view is that Q4 starts at Thanksgiving. That is increasingly wrong. Amazon has been conditioning buyers to start holiday shopping earlier for years, and Big Deal Days is part of that strategy on purpose.

A few things that happen in October that compound into Q4:

• Keyword CPCs are still lower. By mid-November, major categories are in full bidding competition. October is the last window where you can acquire customers at reasonable ad cost before the holiday premium hits.
• Holiday intent is already present. Shoppers browsing Big Deal Days are gift-shopping, not just deal-hunting. Basket sizes and repeat purchase rates from October buyers tend to be higher than summer Prime Day buyers in many categories.
• BFCM retargeting starts here. Customers who see your brand in October are in your retargeting funnel for BFCM. October visibility compounds into November revenue.

Sunhollow Supply, a home goods brand, ran their first structured Big Deal Days strategy last year. They boosted budgets 40% during the event window, restored automatically after, and saw BFCM sponsored product conversion rates that were 18% higher among shoppers who had interacted with their ads in October. The retargeting compounding is real.

The three things to set up before the sale

You do not need to wait for Amazon to announce official dates before you start preparing. The setup work is the same regardless of whether the event is October 10 or October 17. Here is what to configure now.

1. An event rule for the Big Deal Days window

An event rule is built for exactly this type of situation. You define a ramp period (the days leading into the sale), a peak window (the active event days), and an automatic restore that brings everything back to baseline when the event ends. No manual adjusting mid-sale, no forgetting to turn things back down after.

For Big Deal Days, a typical event rule setup looks like:

• Ramp: 3-5 days before the event. Increase bids or budgets by 15-25% to capture early traffic as shoppers start browsing deals.
• Peak: The two event days. Full boost, typically 40-60% above baseline depending on category competition.
• Tail: 2-3 days after. A gentle step-down that captures late shoppers without burning budget at peak rates.
• Restore: Automatic. The rule returns everything to your pre-event baseline.

The reason to set this up now is not urgency, it is testing. You want to know that your rule is configured correctly before the sale starts, not discover a misconfiguration on the morning of day one.

2. Budget rules for the event window

Even if you have an event rule, a dedicated budget rule for the Big Deal Days dates gives you a second layer of control. Budget rules handle the daily cap level, while event rules can target bids and modifiers. Running both together gives you bid-level and budget-level coverage.

Set a budget rule to boost your daily campaign caps during the October window. When the event ends, the rule restores your baseline caps automatically. No manual edits, no budget left sitting at inflated levels after the sale is over.

3. Dayparting calibrated for October traffic patterns

Big Deal Days generates different hourly traffic than your typical weekday. Shoppers tend to check deals first thing in the morning and again in the evening. Your standard dayparting schedule may be cutting campaigns during exactly those windows.

Look at your existing dayparting rules before the event and confirm they are not suppressing ads during the high-intent hours. If you are running aggressive overnight pauses, make sure they lift early enough on event mornings to capture the first-hour traffic.

The timeline from now through BFCM

One of the most useful ways to think about Big Deal Days is as the first event in a two-event sequence. BFCM is six weeks after Big Deal Days. If you go into October unprepared, you are also going into BFCM without a tested playbook.

Here is the timeline that makes sense for most sellers:

• Now (August): Audit your campaigns and clean up negatives. Set up your automation rules so they are tested and running before October.
• September: Confirm your event rule settings. Review your budget caps and make sure they account for the October volume increase. Check your dayparting rules.
• Early October: Activate your Big Deal Days ramp. Your rule should handle most of this automatically.
• Post-event (late October): Review performance. Update your BFCM event rule with what you learned. The two events are close enough that Big Deal Days becomes a live test of your BFCM setup.
• November: BFCM. You go in with a proven event rule, tested settings, and retargeting audience built from October buyers.

The sellers who struggle with BFCM are usually the ones who treated it as the starting line. The sellers who do well are the ones for whom BFCM is the second race of the season.

If you are not on ad automation software yet

The math on timing matters here. Off Hours offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. If you start your trial in August or early September, you have enough runway to:

• Connect your Amazon account and let the platform learn your campaigns
• Set up and test your dayparting rules on normal traffic before the event
• Configure your Big Deal Days event rule and budget boosts
• Go into October with automation that has already been running, not automation you turned on the day before

The risk of waiting until October is not just that you miss Big Deal Days. It is that you arrive at BFCM without having tested anything. A 14-day trial started in late October gives you a few days of live data before the highest-stakes week of the year. That is not a good position to be in.

Start the trial now. Use October as your test. Use BFCM as the payoff.