Amazon’s (AMZN) annual Prime Day sale — the online retail extravaganza that sees site-wide deals and discounts on a myriad of products — kicks off this week from Tuesday, July 16, and lasts until Wednesday, July 17. The two-day event sees major discounting on Amazon-branded products and third-party goods, an optimal time for Amazon customers to purchase top-of-the-line electronics and tech.
CNET managing editor Nick Wolny joins Wealth! to discuss the best deals consumers can look forward to for Amazon’s Prime Day and how the e-commerce platform is leveraging “invite-only” deals to create scarcity for through aggressive price cuts.
For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Wealth!
This post was written by Nicholas Jacobino
Video Transcript
Attention all coupon cutters, discount divers and saving Savants Amazon Prime Day, 2024 is just days away starting on Tuesday, July 16th, running through Wednesday, July 17th, Amazon members, they get access to millions of deals on the annual event here to cut through the noise and tell you about some of the best ways to save.
We’ve got Nick Woolley who is the managing editor over at CNET.
Nick.
Great to see you.
Thanks for hopping on here with us.
All right, let’s break down some of these deals.
What do people need to know?
Especially as we go into this, almost like Christmas in July type of shopping.
Bonanza, if you will.
Christmas in July is definitely a good way to put it and Amazon knows what they’re doing at this point.
It’s the 10th year that they’ve offered prime day and we actually have seen a total evolution of summer shopping as a result of that.
Uh Walmart just did a deal as well.
Target had a week long deal.
We’re definitely seeing a theme of retailer subscriptions prime day is best for Amazon branded products.
So if you were looking for something like an echo speaker, an Alexa maybe a kind, maybe a ring doorbell.
Then this is going to be the absolute best time of year in terms of prices for those products.
It’s also a really good event when it comes to smart home product shopping and electronics in general.
So often this time of year ends up getting conflated with back to school shopping season, people get kind of an early start, particularly if you have kids going off to college, needing electronics, things like that, you’ll see really aggressive discounts.
You’re also going to see more aggressive discounts from retailers in general as they’re trying to undercut one another.
E commerce competition is definitely heating up and consumers are also definitely feeling the heat even though CP I was down slightly last month.
What we also know is that consumers don’t care a lot about CP I, they care about what the price is on their receipt when they get their groceries at the supermarket.
And so they’re being a little bit more choosy with prices and discounts this year than in years past.
Absolutely.
You when you talked about the number of different retailers that are running their promotional specials, what can consumers do in the form of what they would normally do which is go into a store and say, hey, your competitor has it at this price is, is price matching an option when you hear about some of the jousting that these retailers are doing, especially during blitzes like this.
Yeah, you’ll definitely see some price matching language and opportunities particularly between the biggest retailers, Walmart target.
Uh Best buy can potentially be offering price matching as well.
And it’s good to take that time and really comparison shop along the way.
Uh There are some nice widgets and nice plugins that you can look into Camel, Camel, Camel.
All one word is one of them that will allow you to comparison shop on a product.
If you’re looking at the price of a product on say Amazon, and it’s actually available for a lower price on something like walmart.com or target.com, you’ll be able to get an alert and that really is the digitized version of comparison shopping and coupon cutting.
It’s gonna help you ensure that you get the lowest price.
And for some retailers, uh different categories of products are cheaper at one retailer than they are at others.
That’s going to be an easy low lift way to keep up on where the lowest prices are.
How do you spot a good deal?
I mean, what’s the average type of discounting that we should be expecting as shoppers?
It’ll widely vary depending on the type of product you could see discounts anywhere from 10 to 50%.
Uh What we also are seeing is for products that are especially popular Amazon.
Uh It’s the second year that they’re offering something called invite only deals and so it kind of works a little bit like a lottery, you indicate your interest in a particular deal and if you get the golden ticket, then you’re gonna be eligible to get uh that item for that price for a limited amount of time.
An example of that would be 40% off Sony head phones, 30% off some Peloton products.
Those are really good deals, really aggressive deals, but there’s limited inventory.
And so Amazon wants to just up the ante and you know, create more urgency, create more scarcity.
So this is the second year we’ve seen this invite only option.
You can only apply for one product at a time using that invite only option.
But if you really know you want a great deal on one particular item, one particular electronic gadget, then that might be a good thing to sign up for in the next few days as well.
Nick, I only got 30 seconds left, got to hustle to the finish here.
But when do I know when not to buy something, when not to press purchase or check out?
Well, comparison shopping is going to be the best way to go.
Also, the CME Commerce Team has said that Amazon is actually not the best retailer for back to school.
So often this time of year gets conflated with back to school shopping Walmart and Target are going to have better prices for those back to school supplies.
So maybe check that out in order to get those best deals, Nick, w who’s been managing over at CNET?
Nick?
Thanks so much for taking the time here with us today.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
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