Amazon Prime Day is the one day of the year when Amazon discounts Prime subscriptions and runs hot deals on lots of different products
Amazon has now officially launched Prime Day and this year it falls on July 11 – the second Tuesday of the month as per the last couple of years.
If you’ re not familiar with Prime Day, it’s when Amazon goes mad for 24 hours and offers big discounts on things you might actually want to buy. It’s a bit like Black Friday and Cyber Monday except it’s Amazon-only, available exclusively to Prime members and designed to drive sign-ups to the Amazon Prime service.
This year, Amazon is once again running a huge offer on Prime subscriptions, allowing any non-Prime members to bag a year of Prime for just £59 rather than £79 – a truly fantastic deal. This deal only runs until July 3 though, so be quick if you like the look of it.
Prime, remember, offers unlimited next day (and sometimes same-day) deliver, music and video streaming and a whole range of other awesome stuff .
This year Prime Day will last for 30 hours rather than the usual 24. That’s right, you’ll get an additional 6 hours of deals, starting from 9pm on July 10 and running through to midnight on July 11.
This is a side-effect of the Amazon Prime Day US strategy which is to start at 9pm Eastern and run through to midnight Pacific – three hours more at each end.
Hundreds of thousands of deals will be available – exclusive to Prime members -throughout Prime Day, with a huge batch of ‘deals of the day’ which will run all day, supported by a smorgasbord of lightning deals which will go live every five minutes – you only get to find out the price when the deal goes live so you’ll need to either be on your toes – or on this page on TechRadar where we’ll list all of the best options!
The “hundreds of thousands of deals” claim is slightly dubious as it adds up all of the Prime Day deals across all 13 participating countries. That being said, there will still be thousands of deals available in the UK so you probably won’t be short of prices to browse through.
“Our members love Prime Day and we were thrilled by the response over the last two years. It is inspiring us to make it even better this year for Prime members, ” says Greg Greeley, Vice President Amazon Prime, about all of this.
“Every side of our business is working to deliver more deals for a record number of shoppers. We even decided that 24 hours in a day just isn’ t enough time to shop all of the great deals – so we’ re giving Prime members 30 hours to shop on Prime Day!”
Amazon promises that this year’s Prime Day will see deals that are much easier to find and navigate which can only be a good thing. In general, the Amazon site is somewhat of a monstrosity if you don’t know exactly what you’re going for. The search is superb, but the browsing experience can be quite painful. Any wor to improve this gets a thumbs up from us.
If you use the Amazon app, you’ll also for the first time in the UK be able to track all of the Prime Day lightning deals and get alerts when the ones you want become active. Last year this service was only available in the US, and it makes the lightning deals experience a lot easier to make use of.
Last year it was the biggest day in Amazon’s history: Amazon’s traffic was up 36%. It sold 90,000 TVs and thousands of Kindle Paperwhites, Fire TV Sticks and tablets.
In just three hours US customers had bought 18,048 pairs of headphones, while in the UK we bought 600 Trunki suitcases before breakfast. Amazon sold enough Philips Hue bulbs to replace every light in the Albert Hall daily for four and a half years.
So what exactly is Prime Day? Can you trust the deals or is Amazon at it? And when will Prime Day 2017 be anyway? Read on for the answers to these questions and some you might not have thought of.
Amazon Prime Day 2017 will fall on July 11, though in the UK it will start at 6pm on July 10. In the US it’ll run from 9pm Eastern to midnight Pacific.
Prime Day exists to promote Amazon’s Prime subscription service, which Amazon says is the best deal in the history of shopping. Prime Day is for Prime members, many of whom will sign up for a free trial of the service so they can get the deals. Once signed up, many of them stay as Prime subscribers.
If you’re not a member, you can for the next few days bag a £20 discount, or sign up for a 30 day free trial .
If you’ re looking for bargains, Prime Day 2017 is important – not just for gadgets, but for any kind of item. For example, on Prime Day 2016 Prime members bought 215,000 pressure cookers, 200,000 pairs of headphones, 24,000 hammocks, 23,000 Roomba robots and 14,000 Lenovo laptops.
The crucial difference between Prime Day and Black Friday/Cyber Monday – other than it being Amazon’s idea – is that November’s deals are geared towards gifting, because of course it’s the holiday season. Amazon Prime Day is more about personal shopping, either for treating yourself or for saving money household items.
That depends on what you’ re planning to buy. Discounts on Amazon’s own products – the Amazon Echo, Fire TV Stick, Fire Tablets and Kindle e-readers for example – are pretty much guaranteed, and there will be stacks of lightning deals on the day too. Unless Amazon decides to do things radically differently this year it’s going to be a really mixed bag, with laptop deals next to handbag deals next to power tools and prosecco. If only there was a website beginning with “T” and ending in “echradar.com” to find the best deals so you don’ t have to delve through the dross. Hang on… there is!
As you’ d expect, we’ re going to be hyped up on energy drinks throughout Prime Day on both sides of the Atlantic, finding the deals that you really don’ t want to miss.
Yes and no. While Prime is for Prime customers, there will be other deals on the day that are open to everyone – it’s just that with lightning deals, which tend to have limited stock, the Prime users get to see them before anybody else. That means some of the very best deals can be gone long before people who aren’ t Prime members get to know about them.
That doesn’ t mean you need to pay for a Prime membership, though. You can sign up for a free trial and take full advantage of all the Prime benefits, including Prime Day. But don’ t forget to cancel the trial afterwards if you don’ t intend to continue. If you don’ t, you’ ll be automatically billed for membership when the trial period ends.
Yes. Amazon Student gives you Prime membership for £39 per year instead of the usual £79, and it’s completely free for the first six months. It’s worth considering not just for Prime Day, but for the included TV, music and movie streaming.
We’ d expect Prime Day 2017 to follow the template of the last two Prime Days. In the week or two before hte big day, we’ll see an enticing Amazon Prime subscription discount. Then on the day itself deals will be grouped into two category: Deals of the Day, which tend to be the most eye-catching and which are available in big numbers, and Lightning Deals, which cover every conceivable kind of product, have limited availability and often sell out very quickly.
