A note from our CEO

Hi everyone,

Let’s talk Amazon grocery; what’s the deal with same day delivery of perishables (and Fresh)?

Amazon made headlines late last year when they announced that same day grocery delivery was expanding to over 2,300 new cities. This felt meaningful, but at the time it wasn’t clear exactly what it meant or how it would interface with Fresh, Whole Foods, and regular .com delivery. Now we're starting to get a clearer picture.

Same Day Delivery items shop just like your normal .com products with the standard Prime delivery badge. You don’t have a separate cart like Fresh or WFM, it’s just normal Amazon shopping.

This option has quietly grown since last year. At the end of 2025, we reported on eggs and bananas growing 10x in search volume on Amazon. That spike is almost certainly because of this change, and we expect to see search volume on regular grocery items continue to climb as awareness and adoption grow.

Amazon shuttered all physical Fresh (and Go) stores about 2 months ago. As a result, we’ve seen Fresh velocities, particularly of refrigerated items, drop a fair bit. It makes sense - you might trust the Amazon person to deliver bananas, but milk is a different level of trust and risk (sitting on your porch in the sun!).

At the same time, we’ve seen significant lift in .com or “core Amazon” sales. Sourcing isn’t super clear; Amazon may be getting product from a distributor, as some or our clients aren’t getting POs alongside their Fresh POs.

We have also heard whispers of Fresh warehouses being migrated to Same Day Delivery, which continues the move toward a Big Fat Unified Amazon Grocery entity.

This is changing fast. And for brands already on Fresh, we see Same Day Delivery's product mix roughly mirroring Fresh. If you’re a smaller brand looking for exposure, we haven’t seen straightforward “ins” yet - but a Launchpad program like those of the past could be coming someday.

In other news, Prime Day is in JUNE this year, which brings in lots of interesting factors in terms of timing and seasonality we don’t typically have. But also some unique opportunities for crafty brands to stand out. Keep reading if you’re in charge of ops for your brand - our Operations Expert Committee has some Prime Day prep tips below!

We’re also super excited about Chewy’s self-serve tools and the opportunities this channel presents for pet brands, so we put together a paper going over our experiences with the platform. More info on that below, but if you want to jump right to the paper click here.

Chris

In this newsletter:

• Sales and Ad Spend Numbers

• Prepping Your Ops for June Prime Day

• Cartograph x Chewy - A Channel Guide for Pet Brands

• How Cartograph used Perpetua’s Amazon DSP budget optimization to drive 281% sales growth for a nutrition brand

• Search Term Trends

Last Month’s Sales and Ad Spend Numbers

March saw an unusually large spike in sales this year, largely due to the success of the Big Spring Sale. We saw excellent results across the board that exceeded our expectations; while it didn't have eye-popping single day sales like Prime Day, we saw sustained 1.5-3x days for the full duration of the sale (which lasted over a week).

Prepping Your Ops for June Prime Day:

Tips from Our Operations Expert Committee

1. Running out of stock (OOS) during a Prime Day event negates the benefits of running deals - if it looks like you’re going to go OOS, you should most likely return to normal prices to minimize the loss of profit.

   1. Please note that canceling certain deal types can cause you to incur fines, so run the numbers to see if canceling the deal will save you money over allowing the remaining inventory to sell at the sale price.

   2. It typically takes 6 hours during a tentpole event for deal updates to kick in, so try to be proactive.

   3. Shift your promos to slower-moving items.

   4. Pause or reduce budgets on any ads driving traffic to items in danger of stocking out.

   5. Remember the “V-effect” - for every day you’re OOS, it takes two days to get your sales momentum back.

      

      Showing the V-effect of going OOS on sales velocity

2. Monitor your storage capacity limits as you prep for Prime Day - you may not be able to send in additional inventory if you run out of capacity!

   1. Check your current capacities in Seller Central Capacity Manager

   2. June capacity is out NOW - if you’re worried about needing additional inventory for Prime Day, you should bid for the space ASAP before it runs out or becomes more expensive. The sooner you bid, the cheaper it will be.

   3. General Rule of Thumb for Capacity: If you’re currently using 50%+ of your April capacity, you should most likely bid for additional space for June.

3. FBA Inventory Deadlines for June Prime Day:

   1. May 19 - FBA shipments with the “Minimal Shipment Splits” option

   2. May 27 - FBA shipments with the “Amazon-optimized Shipment Splits” option

   3. We recommend shipping all Prime Day inventory by May 5th to account for any unforeseen delays.

[Whitepaper] Cartograph x Chewy - A Channel Guide for Pet Brands

We’re super excited about the work we’ve been doing with some of our pet brands on Chewy, so we put together a quick report on our thoughts on the channel and how it stacks up against ecomm’s biggest dog (pun very much intended), Amazon. Click here to see the full paper.

[Case Study] How Cartograph used Perpetua’s Amazon DSP budget optimization to drive 281% sales growth for a nutrition brand

We partnered with our friends at Perpetua to put together a split test of Amazon DSP ads utilizing Amazon’s built-in budget optimizer versus Perpetua’s advanced optimization tools. As the headline implies, the results weren’t particularly close. Check out the full case study here.