Why DTC Brands Struggled During Prime Day 2025

Amazon Prime Week 2025 was longer than ever, and tougher than ever for DTC brands. While Amazon saw record-breaking order volume, most independent ecom stores faced steep drop-offs in traffic, conversions, and return on ad spend. What happened? And what should brands do differently next time?

Despite increased order volume on Amazon (up 99% year-over-year), many DTC brands saw their worst Facebook performance of the year. For accounts that had been growing 20–30% YoY, July was flat. Why?

It’s not just the algorithm. It’s not just Prime. It’s consumer behavior, and we need to talk about it.

After a strong 4th of July, most brands experienced the typical post-sale slump. But Prime Week compounded it. If you’re not running deals on Amazon, or worse, if your ads are sending people to your DTC site while Amazon offers a faster, cheaper alternative, your cart abandonment goes up, your ROAS goes down, and your July performance flatlines.

The rise in cart drop-offs and Meta ad inefficiencies isn’t theoretical. It’s happening. And the way consumers shop now makes it worse.

Today’s consumer behavior is fragmented. People doom-scroll through Reels, see your product, screenshot it, and then Google it. Or check ChatGPT. Or wait for Prime Day. Or forget entirely.

Click-through sales? They’re vanishing. Especially with Gen Z.

Even Meta’s own conversion-optimized ads only reach ~20% of users, the ones most likely to buy now. That’s a tight auction. CPMs climb. Performance drops. Everyone scrambles.

But the smartest brands? They’re breaking out of the conversion pool and exploring higher-funnel tactics: add-to-cart objectives, reminder ads, and mid-funnel brand awareness campaigns.

Reminder ads, available natively in Meta’s engagement objective, let users opt in to be notified about your upcoming sales. They’re cheap, effective, and powerful.

In accounts where weekend promos had underperformed, running reminder ads from Monday to Friday led to forecasts being hit (or exceeded) by Saturday. Why? You're not fighting for attention during the sale, you’ve already earned it.

July isn’t just slow. It’s the perfect month for testing.

But that doesn’t mean burning your BAU campaigns. Instead:

Testing isn’t just about creative. It’s about structure, bid types, event objectives, new visitor %, and preparing your account to scale. Especially now, as Meta experiments with budget scheduling tools that let you “infuse” ad sets with timed spend spikes during key moments.

With upcoming iOS 26 changes set to strip click IDs, we’re entering another post-iOS14.5 era. Brands can’t rely solely on click-based attribution anymore. Instead, they need to adopt a three-pronged measurement model:

This isn't theory, it's survival. Relying only on last-click will have you scaling down your demand creation channels simply because they don’t convert immediately. That’s a mistake you can't afford in Q4.

It’s easy to talk about testing, scaling, and "letting the kite fly", but it takes liquidity to do it. Most smaller brands forget this. They focus on revenue, not capital deployment.

But performance marketing is capital allocation. You need to trust the algorithm and the operator.

As our founder, Andrew, put it: “You don’t get to $10M+ in spend by accident. You get there by making good decisions, especially about who you hire to manage your media.”

If you think Gen Z shops like Millennials, think again.

The shift to “socialtainment” has made it harder than ever to sell with traditional attribution models. Consumers don’t click to buy. They consume, get influenced, and make purchasing decisions days or weeks later, often off-platform.

Success today means:

July and August are your opportunity to build momentum. If your new customer %, new visitor %, email opt-ins, and CRM engagement are trending up, you’re setting the foundation for a successful Q4.

If they’re not, now’s the time to fix it.

This isn’t about gimmicks. It’s about knowing how to fish in deeper waters, and making sure your captain knows what they’re doing.

If you're not planning for Q4 right now, you’re already behind.

And if your media strategy still assumes people will click and convert right away, it might be time to rewrite the playbook.

Let us know what trends you’re seeing this summer. Are you testing anything that’s working? Curious to hear from other brand leaders in the trenches.