$9.86B. Mostly Toilet Paper.

Happy Friday,

Scott ComfortPlus. Premier Protein. Lysol wipes. Dawn Powerwash. Dunkin' Refreshers. That's Numerator's top five for Prime Big Deal Days, in order.

Amazon spent two days and a global press cycle on a sale, and America used it to not run out of toilet paper.

Start with the receipt, because the receipt is the story.

Not one of those five has ever been wrapped. Two of them live under a sink. The rest of the panel reads like a Costco run with a Prime badge stapled to it: 68% of items under $20, 2% over $100, $23.19 per item, which is roughly a car wash. The average household spent $114, under the $122 the same households spent in June, so the big fall event is the summer event with a lighter wallet. The shoppers came, they bought twelve rolls at $4.49, and they went home to use them.

Amazon's own line on the event: customers shopped millions of items at its lowest prices of the year. Technically true. Also true of a Tuesday at Walgreens, which does not issue a press release about it.

Now the number everyone will quote. Adobe says $9.86 billion in U.S. online spend over the two days, up 8.5 percent, toys up 158 percent, electronics up 85 percent, premium share up 21 percent. That figure covers every U.S. retailer, and Walmart and Target ran competing sales the same 48 hours, so it's less a measurement of Amazon than a measurement of October. Both things are true at once: the internet traded up to a TV, and Amazon's own cart filled with paper products.

Adobe counted the TV. Numerator counted the cart.

Now follow the money.

Amazon is fine with a pantry sale. Delighted, even. eMarketer put it plainly this week: Amazon doesn't need October to pull gifting forward. It needs you to restock on a Prime badge, because the second 12-pack of shakes is a Subscribe & Save enrollment with a countdown timer on it. The event isn't a gift event. It's a habit event wearing a gift event's clothes.

So if you sell a $45 product and paid the deal fee, you didn't buy a holiday spotlight. You rented a shelf in a grocery aisle. Your Lightning Deal sat between a 12-roll of Scott at $4.49 and shakes at half off, and the person who scrolled past you had $23 per item in their head and a list on their phone that said "wipes." You were the impulse. The impulse lost to Dawn.

The event worked for Amazon whether or not it worked for you. That isn't a bug in the format. That's the format.

Now the honest part.

The register rang. $9.86 billion is real money and it grew. Numerator's panel is a survey panel, not Amazon's ledger, and Adobe's trade-up data says plenty of shoppers bought something expensive that week, somewhere. A replenishment shopper who met your brand for the first time at a discount is still a new customer, and some of them come back at full price. And nobody made you take the deal slot; Amazon offered a sale, and the sale sold.

Read that as fairness. The cart is still the cart. The format has 91 percent awareness and a toilet paper problem it does not consider a problem.

Oct 15 — the peak fee is live. FBA, MCF and Buy with Prime shipments leaving Amazon's buildings now carry the holiday surcharge, averaging $0.32 a unit through Jan 14. It's on the ship date, not the order date, so every Prime Big Deal Days order that shipped late is already paying it.

The layoffs landed during the sale. Fewer than 1,000 Stores roles, per Reuters, with customer service and selling partner support among them, per internal Slack posts reviewed by Business Insider. Emails went out Oct 6, as the Lightning Deals went live. If you have a case open, reply to it this week and put a date on the record.

Oct 17 — SFP weekends count again. The grace period that kept weekends out of Seller Fulfilled Prime's delivery-speed metrics ends Saturday. Pull your one-day and two-day percentages Monday, because the number you've been watching since July was the easy version.

Thirty minutes. Give it to whoever owns your deals calendar.

Decide, per ASIN, whether last week's deal found new buyers or just pulled your own forward, before the Black Friday list locks.

The deal list. Deals dashboard: every ASIN that ran a Prime Big Deal Days deal.

The pull. Business Reports, Detail Page Sales and Traffic by Child Item, two ranges: Sept 1–30 and Oct 8–14. Business Reports run about a day behind, so Oct 14 is in by this morning.

The ratio. For every ASIN, deal or not: Oct 8–14 daily units divided by September daily units. That's the ASIN's post-event hangover.

The control. Average that ratio across the ASINs that did not run a deal. That's the hangover everyone got when the sale ended.

The call. A deal ASIN more than 20 points below the control pulled forward buyers you already had: cut it from the Black Friday and Cyber Monday list. At or above the control, it found new ones: keep it. Upcoming deals cancel from the Deals dashboard before they start, which is the free window.

Artifact: a keep/cut column beside every Prime Big Deal Days ASIN, with the control ratio written at the top of the sheet.

Skip any ASIN that went out of stock, lost the Featured Offer, kept a coupon running after the event, or had an ad-spend change over 25% in either window; those dips aren't the deal's. This measures pull-forward, not profitability, and it says nothing about new-to-brand. Don't score the deal on Oct 6–7 units; deal days always spike, that's what a deal is. And don't cut the whole list because everything dipped. Everything dips when a sale ends. That's what the control is for. October deal prices were carved out of November's lookback, so your Black Friday price cap isn't the problem here.

Amazon ran the biggest sale of the fall and the country bought wipes.

Next time, check what's on the shelf before you pay for the shelf.

See you Tuesday.

Any questions? Book a meeting with me here.

Dan Head

Founder, AMZ Elite