With Amazon extending its summer Prime Day to a four-day discounting event for the first time this year, many retailers – including Argos, JD Williams and Boots – also launched their own promotional campaigns, hoping to go toe-to-toe with Amazon.

This year, Amazon reported its “biggest ever” Prime Day event, generating record sales and helping customers “save billions” on deals, tipped as being “equivalent to two Black Fridays.”

However, data from product discovery platform Constructor suggests that, despite rival retailers offering discounts during the Prime Day period (08 – 11 July 2025), consumers weren’t searching beyond Amazon, limiting the halo effect of the event on non-Amazon sites.

Analysis of over 160million search queries across 100+ retail sites during Prime Day 2024 and 2025 by Constructor showed that while many retailers ran competing sales, there was no increase in sales-related searches, such as “sale,” “promo” or “clearance”, on non-Amazon sites during the Prime Day period.

“Most shoppers aren’t trained to look for deals across other sites,” Nate Roy, Strategic Director of Ecommerce Innovation at Constructor, said. “Even though early sales results from other retailers have been promising, our data suggests that they have yet to fully capitalise on the opportunity.”

“For nearly a decade, Amazon has built Prime Day into more than just a mid-summer promotion – it’s become a cultural event that rivals Black Friday in terms of visibility and shopper engagement,” Roy continued. “In recent years, with many retailers and brands launching their own major promotions during that window, the result is a July sales landscape that’s increasingly crowded – and coordinated.”

While Prime Day saw a limited halo effect for other retailers, Black Friday remains a different matter, suggesting consumers are hard-wired to search for discounts beyond Amazon during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales events.

Across the same set of retailers, Constructor’s data showed promotion-related search activity jumped by x1.5 during Black Friday last year – signalling shopper expectations around discounts at many different stores.