Amazon Prime Day 2018 When It Starts and Finding the Best Deals

Amazon’s Prime Day is a day of discounts—on both the company’s own offerings and other stuff sold on its marketplace—that the online retailer has held in mid-July for the past three years. In 2018, the event will start at 3 p.m. Eastern on Monday, July 16, and will run for the next 36 hours, through the end of Tuesday, July 17, on the West Coast. That’s an extra six hours of deals compared with 2017’s 30-hour event.

Based on our experience last year, we expect Amazon to start with strong deals on its own offerings, including Echo and Kindle models. Additional deals will go live throughout Monday evening, and then fully ramp up during the daytime on Tuesday. Whether they’re shorter lightning deals or daylong discounts, we’ll be prepared to help you find the best deals.

Amazon says it will offer more than a million deals this Prime Day. On previous Prime Days, Amazon has offered hundreds of thousands of these one-day-only deals. And although many of those are solid deals on good products, not all of them make our Prime Day Deals page. Last year, our staff scanned nearly 24,000 deals, and even though all of them offered savings over typical prices, only a small number—112—were what we’d call Wirecutter deals.

That’s a high bar, we know: To make the cut, a deal has to be the best price over the past 90 days on a product our editorial team recommends, and it needs to be available from a trusted retailer. We’ll be posting only those deals we feel the most confident about, according to those criteria.

We’ll be highlighting the best deals from this year on our Prime Day Deals page, our Twitter account, and our Daily Deals newsletter. You can also bookmark this post; throughout the course of the day, we’ll be constantly updating it with the four or five best deals that are currently available, with a brief description of why we like each deal so much.

In the weeks leading up to Prime Day, Amazon has already started offering significant savings on its own services for new members. We think the following four are a particularly good value. Prime Now, the two-hour delivery service, is offering $10 off at Whole Foods (with another $10 to use on a future Whole Foods order) now that the grocery chain is under the Amazon umbrella (as reported by The New York Times, Wirecutter’s parent company). Prime Pantry, its shopping service for grocery essentials, is also offering $10 off orders of more than $40 with free shipping if you start a free 30-day trial. Twitch Prime, Amazon’s game-streaming service, is offering DRM-free games throughout the month. And Amazon Music Unlimited is offering four months of service for a dollar total (a subscription usually costs $8 per month).

We’ll be putting up a new post later today further explaining our standards for what makes a Wirecutter deal at any time of the year—we also make sure those same standards apply to big events like Prime Day and Black Friday. For example, Amazon is planning to make several products available for the first time on Prime Day, including an Alexa-enabled faucet from Delta and a grill from Coleman. But here at Wirecutter, we generally don’t recommend anything we haven’t tested ourselves as part of the editorial team’s research, so we might not post items such as those to the page. (Once we get a chance to test those things in person, we can consider them for future Deals posting.)

The truth is, most advertised discounts in general don’t save shoppers that much money. In some cases, the same stuff can be found for less at other times of the year; in other cases, manufacturers are looking to offload unsold stock of last year’s models. That’s why we put so much effort all year into finding the deals that are worth getting.

Since this sale requires you to be a Prime member to participate, make sure you have at least a trial membership; we’ll go into more details on whether Prime is worth paying for below.

Note too that Amazon runs at least two types of deals on Prime Day: Traditional deals last all day, while lightning deals expire after a set amount of time—or when stock runs out.

Amazon’s app

Amazon’s announcement points to its own apps as a way to prepare for the sale. Beginning Monday, July 9, a new Sneak Peek banner will offer just that on select deals. And during the event, you’ll be able to preview, track, and shop lightning deals—including signing up for push notifications. Our Deals team will be testing both features out, and we’ll be ready to offer advice on how to best use them both. Here’s where you can get the app for iPhone and Android.

What is a lightning deal?

Lightning deals are time-limited discounts that appear on Amazon every day, but they’re especially abundant on Prime Day. They can offer deep discounts on a specific item, and each deal lasts for a set amount of time (usually a few hours) or once stock on that item runs out, whichever happens first. Once you claim a deal, you have a certain amount of time to purchase before your claim expires.

If a deal is sold out, you should join the waitlist (if it isn’t already full), because you might have another chance to claim the deal if another buyer’s claim times out. The good news: Lightning deals can offer deep discounts you wouldn’t otherwise see. The bad news: The better lightning deals get snatched up within minutes, and you have to sift through thousands to find them. Or you can save yourself the hassle and see all the good ones on our Twitter account.

Is it worth signing up for Amazon Prime for this?

That depends. You’ll need to be a Prime member to take advantage of the discounts, and Amazon tends to run a few big sales that would offset the price of Prime by a significant amount. Since Prime typically costs about $120 per year, Prime Day alone might not be worth the investment.

However, the primary purpose of signing up for Prime is to get free two-day shipping on many items. If you place roughly 20 orders on Amazon within a year and upgrade to that two-day shipping, the cost of membership begins to balance out. It tips in your favor even more if you use the add-ons such as Amazon’s video and music streaming services. With select orders over $35, you can get free same-day shipping in many areas, as well as 20 percent discounts on video game preorders. We’ve noticed more of the site’s discounts requiring you to be a Prime member, as well, so it really depends on your shopping habits; some of those offers are from Prime-exclusive coupons, but most are items that you can order only as a Prime member, similar to how Costco handles its arrangement. You can make Prime pay off, but membership won’t be worth it for everyone.

If you’re eager to check out Prime for Prime Day (and beyond), you can sign up for a 30-day trial to give it a spin before committing your $120. Other ways to get Prime include a six-month free trial plus 50 percent off for students with a .edu email address.

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