WASHINGTON — Amazon’s Prime Day starts July 16 at 3 p.m. and runs for 36 hours this year, the fourth year for the much-hyped event.
For those who are into it, it is a big deal.
If you want to be a “power” Prime Day shopper, Consumer Reports has some advice on what you should do.
“For example, you download the Amazon app, because that will give you a sneak peek at some of the deals that are happening, including some of the Lightning Deals before they are posted,” Consumer Reports’ James Wilcox told WTOP.
“You should sign up for Deal Alerts so that you get alerts when things that you are interested in go on sale, and create a ‘Watch a Deal’ list so that you will get notified when those things go online.”
One other tip is to delay the check-out process for a few minutes.
“What we’d advise is that you put this thing into your cart so that it will save it and hold it for 15 minutes — so you need to get back within that period of time or it is going to get freed up for other customers — but then you have time to go to other competitive websites and see if that product is available elsewhere for less,” Wilcox said.
Big box retailers like Walmart, Target and Best Buy will be hitching their wagon to Amazon’s Prime Day star with deals of their own over the course of the next few days.
The website CamelCamelCamel.com tracks and shows the price history of just about every product on Amazon, so shoppers can decide whether a Prime sale price is really a good deal.
The site also lets consumers import all items from an Amazon Wish List rather then entering them manually.
In a statement announcing this year’s event, Amazon said it would be featuring “more than one million deals exclusively for Prime members,” as well as some select deals at Whole Foods stores, which Amazon acquired last year.
Amazon recently raised the price of its Prime membership to $119 a year, but for consumers who are not currently Prime members, Consumer Reports points out there are two ways to take advantage of Prime Day sales without an annual commitment.
One is to pay $13 for a one-month membership. The other is to take advantage of Amazon’s free 30-day Prime trial offer.
While Amazon said Prime deals will cover more than one million items, it will be heavily discounting its own digital products like Alexa and other connected home products and its Kindle digital readers and Fire streaming products.
InfoScout said that while two-thirds of Amazon shoppers browsed Prime Day last year, only 37 percent actually made a purchase, and 67 percent of Amazon shoppers said they compared prices on other retailers’ sites.
