Placer.ai: Prime Day boosts Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Kohl’s store traffic
Amazon is not the only retailer that saw traffic rise during its recent Prime Day promotion.
The 2026 edition of Amazon Prime Day ran four days (June 23-26) for the second year in a row, with data from Adobe indicating that the online giant broke records in its performance. A new report from Placer.ai suggests that several of Amazon’s key competitors benefited from increased store visits during the sales extravaganza.
Placer.ai examined store visits to Walmart, Target, Best Buy and Kohl’s during Prime Day against the retailers' year-to-date day-of-week average and found that the four retailers all saw "meaningful" traffic gains during the event. (Each of the four ran their own high-profile sales promotions during or around Prime Day.) Best Buy delivered the strongest incremental traffic lift. Target achieved the strongest year-over-year performance.
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"The data suggests consumer spending remains resilient but increasingly event-driven, with shoppers waiting for major promotions before making purchases," the report noted.
Best Buy and Kohl's led on Prime Day's opening day (June 23), with visits running 18.1% and 18.4% above their respective baselines. Target trailed at 16.3%, while Walmart posted a smaller 4.7% increase. All four retailers continued seeing visit gains throughout the analyzed period.
Comparing daily visits to the prior five weeks' day-of-week average to control for longer-term trends, Placer.ai found that Best Buy stood out with visits up 12.3% on June 23 and holding double-digit gains through Thursday, June 26. Target saw a strong early-week lift, while Walmart sat just below its recent baseline and Kohl's slipped to a -3.9% decline by Friday, June 26.
According to Placer.ai, Best Buy's general strength against recent weeks carries the most useful read on the consumer. Electronics are big-ticket and discretionary, which Placer.ai says is the kind of spending a pressured shopper might be expected to defer. But the event-driven lift suggests that consumers have not stopped making sizable purchases, they have just made them event-dependent.
Measuring Prime Day 2026 against the comparable July 2025 four-day Prime Day event shows Target leading with visits up 10.3% year over-year on opening day and gains every single day of the event. Kohl's also outpaced its 2025 traffic performance through most of the week, while Walmart held modestly positive gains throughout.
