Amazon Prime Day 2018 will land in July around the world and we’ll be listing all of the best deals so you can get straight into the good stuff!
Early Amazon Prime Day deals in the US have started ahead of July 16 and 17, the official Prime Day date confirmed by our exclusive reporting and Amazon itself.
We have an early Prime Day 2018 deals list updated and running (below), and we expect a surge in price drops on Amazon.com over the next two weeks. Discounts will peak midday on July 16, the start time, and run through the 36-hour sales marathon.
It’s going to be the best time to buy Amazon Echo speakers and a brand new 4KTV, as Amazon promises to offer discounts that rival Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It’s become an increasingly important online shopping day in America.
Now that the 4th of July is over, you may be asking questions: How long will it last? What time does Prime Day start? What items will see deep discounts? What are the best Prime Day deals for 2018? We’ve created an in-depth guide in time for July 16.
Prime Day 2018 is going to add to the net worth of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and to the value of Amazon, Inc. and its third-party marketplace sellers. More importantly, it’s a chance for America’s No. 1 online retailer to install Echo speakers, Fire tablets, and Fire TVs in your budding smart home, all in an effort to continue having you pay for that ever-important Amazon Prime subscription.
Ready? Here’s how to get the best prices out of your Prime membership this month.
Amazon routinely starts Prime Day with early deals leading up to the actual date, and 2018 is no different. We’re already seeing savings on its most expensive Echo speakers, with $100 off the original list price.
The best Amazon Prime Day always surround its own products, so that means we’re in for deals on Amazon Echo speakers. We anticipate all-time low priced for $50 Echo Dot ($25 maybe?) and the Amazon Echo Spot (fingers crossed for $80). The latter will be entering its first-ever Prime Day.
Besides nearly guaranteed Amazon Echo deals, you can anticipate other Amazon gadgets on sale: Kindles, Fire TV Sticks, and Fire Tablets. The unmentioned goal of Prime Day is to sneak as many Amazon products and services into your home as possible.
That said, you may also see Amazon’s chief rival, Google, compete with a price match on the Google Home smart speaker, as we predicted: Why Amazon Prime Day will also be the best time to get a Google Home Mini. Google is playing the same game with its Echo-rivaling smart speaker.
And that Amazon Fire TV Cube that was just announced in the US for $119.99 could get a warm reception on Amazon Prime Day, luring new customers into the Amazon Prime family. We predict Amazon may have an epic discount if you buy two of these, as it has done for Echo Show speakers in the past. We’ve hold off on buying, as we’ve noted in Why we’re waiting until Amazon Prime Day to buy the Fire TV Cube.
Nintendo Switch may be getting its first big discounts for Amazon prime Day even though it was only recently that it was nearly impossible to buy in stores. We’re even more certain that PS4 and Xbox One console bundles will see a price drop, or at least come with more value-added games to sweeten existing bundle deals. Microsoft’s Xbox One X and Sony’s PS4 Pro are competing heavily, which is no doubt good for everyone else on a day like Prime Day 2018. That’s why we’ve also written about waiting for an Xbox One X Prime Day deal.
Philips Hue bulbs are a great way to upgrade your home into a smart home. That can be expensive at full price, so we’re waiting until July 16 and 17 to see how many of the multi-colored lighting solutions we can scoop up.
Cheap 4K TVs are a staple of every sales holiday, and Amazon Prime Day is no different here. We’re already running a US cheap TV page. Expect even lower prices from manufacturers like Samsung, LG, and TCL, to name a few..
Amazon Prime Day is the retailer’s big members-only summer sale and it’s been a massive success in the few short years it’s been going. If you want to get involved with the best discounts though, you’ll need to be a member of Amazon Prime. With free next-day delivery on thousands of items and the excellent Amazon Instant Video streaming service being just two of the membership’s key highlights, millions of you are already signed up.
Brilliantly though, you can always sign up for a free 30-day trial to take advantage of the sale and other membership benefits. And if you don’t want to continue the service after Prime Day, just cancel the trial before the 30 days are up. Amazon know too well that many shoppers will find it hard to say goodbye to those super perks though.
More people signed up for Prime on Prime Day last year than on any other day in Amazon’s history. As of April 2018, Amazon confirmed it had passed 100 million subscribers for Amazon Prime, that’s up from around 80 million before Prime Day last year and 58 million in 2016. That’s some pretty incredible year-on-year growth for the last few years. We wouldn’t be surprised to see Amazon Prime’s 2018 numbers grow dramatically again by the time Prime Day arrives.
Amazon also reported that sales via the Amazon app more than doubled year-on-year and « tens of millions of people » used the app to buy items last Prime Day.
So is Amazon Prime Day just another Black Friday? Actually, no. As Amazon puts it, Black Friday is largely about gifts for other people (it’s ok, we had a laugh at that too) – it takes place just at the start of the Christmas shopping season – but Prime Day is all about treating yourself.
The overwhelming majority of decent deals on Prime Day were on things you might buy for yourself or for your home. As you’ll see from the best sellers there were lots of smart home devices sold to Prime customers as well as quite a lot of kitchen gear. There were good deals on laptops and consoles too of course, but they were alongside deals on hammocks, juicers, robot vacuum cleaners and pressure cookers.
We know what you’re thinking: Amazon turned Black Friday into Black Friday Deals Week, so there’s no way it would limit Prime Day to just 24 hours. And you’d be right. Last year’s Prime Day was 30 hours long starting at 9pm the night before and lasting until 3am the day after. We wouldn’t be surprised to see Prime Day 2018 last even longer. Prime Day 2022 may well start before Prime Day 2021 finishes.
They did. It was Free Slurpee Day at 7-Eleven and Cow Appreciation Day at Chick-fil-A, which offered free food to anybody in an animal costume. Meanwhile eBay threw some shade, with a front page claiming that “Their Prime Deal Is Our Everyday Deal”.
According to research firm Bazaarvoice, 76% of US Prime Day shoppers visited rival retailers to check whether they were getting the best deals. And as PwC Consumer Markets analyst Steve Barr told CNBC, “We are seeing other big box retailers use Prime Day as an opportunity to capture shoppers’ appetite for deals and as way to compete against Amazon for share of wallet and mindset.”
So we won’t just be calling out the best Prime Day deals at Amazon, we’ll keep an eye on all your favourite retailers to see what bargains they have. At the very least we expect some sneaky price matching from many stores like Walmart, Newegg and Jet in the US.
As with any sale, some products are end of line stock or things that just aren’t selling (like all those shoddy TVs idiots fight over in supermarkets on Black Friday), but many deals are genuine. Let’s take a look at the US bestseller, the Instant Pot DUO80 pressure cooker. On Prime Day it was $90, and if you check its price history on CamelCamelCamel.com you’ll see that it was tracking at $129 for most of 2017. The camel site is pretty reliable and a great way to check how good a deal really is and it works. It’ll also show you how likely a price is to come back around again, meaning your spending budget might be better spent on something with a rarer discount on Prime Day itself.
There’s one big blip in the graph, though: on the 2nd of July it went up to $209.10, dropping back to $129 the following day. If you’re comparing the Prime Day price to the 2nd of July price then the saving is clearly illusory – but compare it to the normal selling price and it’s clearly still a good deal.
Checking other devices can be illuminating, though.
