Amazon Prime Day is one of the biggest shopping events of the year, alongside Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This year's autumnal edition (again called Prime Big Deal Days) takes place from October 8-9. The two-day shopping affair will likely see Prime members score some of the best prices of the year on Amazon devices, as well as products from Sony, Sonos, Peloton, Withings and other big-name brands. This applies to items from a range of categories, including gaming peripherals, laptops, 4K TVs, phones, PC accessories and more.
As always, you can count on us to only share the best deals during Prime Big Deal Days — plus any worthwhile deals at Walmart, Best Buy, and other competing retailers. But if you want to make sure you're snagging all the deals that matter most to you — or be the first to hear about specific price drops — we've put together some helpful tools and advice.
Below we've listed some of our top tips for bargain hunting, from using automated price trackers to the various ways you can set up your own personalized bargain alerts. All of these methods and tools are free and if you put in just a little work, you can rest easy knowing you don't have to do much until it's time to make a purchase.
Use a price tracking tool or deal aggregator
CamelCamelCamel tracks the price of every product sold on Amazon and can send you alerts when it reaches the price that suits you. When a product reaches the price you set or lower, you will receive an email about it. CamelCamelCamel only However, it works for products on Amazon, so you'll need to use a different one below if you want to track price trends at Walmart, Best Buy, Target, and other retailers.
To track prices and receive email alerts, you'll need to create a free account. We also recommend installing the site's browser extension called The Camelizer, which allows you to view price trends for any product and set your desired price without leaving Amazon. It's fantastic and easy to use.
As soon as one of the products falls below the amount set in your price alert, you will immediately receive an email. And if you already have a wish list saved on Amazon, you can import it into CamelCamelCamel.
Like CamelCamelCamel, the PayPal Honey browser extension can track the prices of items you're interested in and notifies you via email when it finds a deal. However, unlike the price-tracking site above, Honey also scans every page you visit for deal codes that can be applied to your checkout total to save you even more money.
Honey works with Amazon and many other retailers and you can add items to your “droplist,” which is basically just a wishlist. In most cases, the option to add an item to your list will appear on the right-hand side and you can choose how long you want the price watch for as well as the discount percentage you want. As an added convenience, Honey also automatically adds items you browse frequently thanks to something called the “Smart Droplist” feature, which you can turn on and off at will.
Slickdeals rounds up some of the best deals on the web discovered by its team and community of users. It's a great place to find a curated selection of deals on things you might be interested in. The site also lets you create deal alerts based on keywords, but these work a little differently on Slickdeals than on the websites mentioned above.
You can enter a product name like “Sonos Era 100” or the name of a retailer. Once the product is added to your list, you'll be notified via a deal alert if it matches your criteria. You can set it to notify you of all deals related to your keyword, or you can filter out deals so you're notified if, for example, the deal is popular enough to make it to the Slickdeals homepage or gets a high rating from the community. Making these keywords a little too general can result in frequent notification pings and emails, though, so you'll need to be a little cautious and find the right balance of how aggressively you want to be notified by Slickdeals.
Keepa is another handy tool that lets you track and compare Amazon prices over time. Like CamelCamelCamel, Keepa offers charts that track price trends and alerts you when it finds a deal. You can also import any wish lists you've previously saved on Amazon.
However, unlike CamelCamelCamel, you don't necessarily need to create an account to track prices with Keepa. You just need to install the extension and Keepa will automatically add a price history chart to the supported product listings. The embedded extension also offers different tabs, one of which shows the price history and another allows you to specify various price details. Once you set your desired price, you will receive price alerts via email, push notification, Telegram or RSS.
Set up notifications about special offers via Alexa or the Amazon app
If you're a Prime member and own a fourth-generation Echo speaker or newer model, you can also ask Amazon to send you deal alerts for products you're interested in up to 24 hours in advance. Amazon can notify you of price drops on eligible products in your cart or wish list, as well as anything you've marked as “Saved for Later.” To enable the feature, in the Alexa app, tap More > Settings > Notifications, then tap Amazon Shopping. Then scroll down to Shopping Recommendations and turn on Deal Recommendations. Once that's done, you'll receive a notification on both your device and your Echo speaker (the latter in the form of a yellow ring) letting you know about the deal.
Alternatively, you can sign up to receive deal alerts about products you've recently viewed in the Amazon Shopping app, as well as products related to your recent search history. If you're a Prime member, all you need to do is navigate to the Prime Big Deal Days event page in the mobile app between now and October 8 to create the alert. Once done, you'll receive push notifications about any deals you're subscribed to when the event begins on October 8. You can also just open the Amazon Shopping app and tap Settings > Notifications > Deals & Recommendations before toggling Savings and/or Recommendations.
Search for deals outside of Amazon
Prime Day and Prime Big Deal Days are events that showcase Amazon's huge retail presence, so naturally other retail chains take notice. Because of this, you can sometimes find better deals at retailers like Target, Walmart, and Best Buy. At the very least, they may be able to beat Amazon's prices if you ask.
If Amazon's upcoming sale doesn't have everything you want, or you just want to make sure you're getting the best deal, shop around a bit. Walmart, for example, is hosting its own sale starting October 8, and Target is planning a “Circle Week” promotion for members of its free Target Circle program starting October 6. And again, you'll find all of our deals inside and outside of Amazon here.
Trust the experts
We're very picky here at The Verge, so don't fret if you go in unprepared. We'll be rounding up the best tech deals and keeping our coverage updated in the lead up to the main event. So mark October 8th and 9th in your calendars, sign up for Amazon Prime and our new and improved Verge Deals newsletter, and maybe start putting some spending money aside.