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 Prime Day 2017 starts tomorrow at 6pm! Many deals will go live for Prime members at Amazon.co.uk at that time, with a tsunami of furhter offers following at midnight and running through the whole of Tuesday.
Prime Day is that day of the year when Amazon runs “hundreds of thousands of deals” exclusively for Prime members, so if you’re not a member and you’ve been thinking of signing up – now would be a good time to get that free trial .
We gave Prime a 5-star review earlier this year so read that review for all the details on why Prime is such a good deal.
It’s fairly safe to say that many of the headline deals on Amazon Prime Day will be on Amazon’s own devices. We’re talking Echo speakers, Kindle e-readers and Fire tablets. We’ ve already heard that the Amazon Fire kiddy tablets will be discounted, so here are our predictions on what other Amazon devices deals we’ ll see on Prime Day:
Throughout the previous week, Amazon has been leaking some of the upcoming Amazon Prime Day deals in order to drum up interest. It started with a vague promise that an unnamed LG 43-inch 4K TV will be “at least 30% off. But since then we’ve had some more firm details.
On Friday, Amazon revealed that the Amazon Fire 7 Kids Edition and Amazon Fire 8 Kids Edition tablets will both be discounted – the 7-inch one will be down from £99.99 to £79.99 and the 8-inch one from £129.99 to £89.99. Also from Amazon, Dash buttons will be down to £1.99 and still come with a £4.99 discount after your first press.
Also interesting of these new Prime Day deals is the Philips Hue White and Colour Ambience Starter Kit – a TechRadar office favourite – which will be discounted by “at least 30%” which means you’ll get three colour E27 bulbs (so that’s the screw caps rather than bayonet fittings) and the Hue Bridge for about £100 which is a really strong deal – the bulbs usually go for about £50 each.
More Amazon Prime Day deals revealed in advance were 50% off the De-Longhi Nespresso Lattissima Touch automatic coffee machine, 35% off the Breville High Gloss sandwich toaster, 65% off the Hoover Freedom 2-in-1 cordless vacuum cleaner and 55% off this Black+Decker cleaning iron .
We’re also going to see a return of one of last year’s most popular deals in 30% off various Trunki ride-on kiddy suitcases. There’s also going to be “at least” 20% off the Motorola video baby monitor as well as various pet-related deals.
While this is the third annual Prime Day, this year Prime members will be getting an additional 6 hours of deals, with 30 hours of mayhem rather than the usual 24. Consequently, the Prime Day deals will start at 6pm on Monday July 10, with new deals launching every five minutes.
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.
“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!”
The extra 6 hours of deals can be explained by Amazon’s Prime Day US strategy, where Prime Day will run from 9pm Eastern Time to midnight Pacific – three extra hours at each end. For us in the UK, it’s pretty handy to see the first deals at a comfortable time in the evening rather than having to stay up until midnight so it’s all good by us.
Amazon also promises that deals this year will be easy to navigate and that’s also a good thing. The Amazon shopping experience is heavily dependent on people searching for what they want – the browsing experience can be quite poor, particularly on Black Friday and manic days like it. So any attempt to make browsing deals a lot easier sounds like a good idea to us and no doubt it’ ll help Amazon shift more gear too.
You’ ll also for the first time on Prime Day be able to use the Amazon app to track the deals you’ re interested in – so as usual with lightning deals, tick the ones you like the look of and you’ ll be alerted when the deal goes live so you can see the new price.
In additional to all of this, Amazon has also launched a big drive on Amazon Music Unlimited – its wannabe Spotify rival. Prime members who haven’ t yet tried the Music Unlimited service can now secure four months of music for just £0.99. Who knows, maybe you’ ll like it? And at that price why not have a look?
Between July 7 and July 11 Prime members also have the chance to win £100,000 in cash simply by streaming Amazon Video via a Fire TV, Fire TV Stick or the Amazon App on your games console. Prime members can also save up to 40% on a Kindle Unlimited membership and up to 25% at Prime Pantry between 3rd July and 6th August.
So yeah, in case you hadn’ t guessed – the whole point of Prime Day from Amazon’s point of view is to drive Prime subscriptions. We’ ll be right there on Prime Day listing all of the best deals so come back to TechRadar on July 11 to see which deals we rate the best!
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 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.
