6 days ago
Amazon Prime Day 2025: Five tips to find the best deals
Amazon's Prime Day sale runs from Tuesday July 8 to Friday July 11 this year. It's one of four annual Amazon sales events, including the Spring Sale in March, the second Prime Day in October and Black Friday in November.
The best deals on Prime Day tend to be on homewares, such as vacuum cleaners and air fryers, or tech, particularly on Amazon's own-brand products such as Fire TVs, Kindles, Echo smart speakers and Fire Tablets.
However, it's important not to get carried away. Not all discounts are as large as they appear and the best can be hard to find. As Recommended Reviews Editor, tasked with helping you make the right choices on your biggest purchases, I've been covering sales events like this since 2021.
I've picked up a few tricks over the years, all of which I'll share below, along with some insight from the Telegraph's consumer champion Katie Morley. If you're in a rush, use these links to jump to my five best tips:
Tips to finding the best deals on Amazon Prime Day, at a glance
How to make sure you're buying from the cheapest seller
How to know you're getting a genuine deal
The best times of day to shop
How to use wish lists and price alerts
What time of year prices are lowest
Why you can trust Telegraph Recommended
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How to find the best deals on Amazon Prime Day
1. Make sure prices aren't lower elsewhere
'If I'm looking for a big ticket item, I'll usually monitor the average price across all retailers, including both Amazon and the high street before buying,' says Telegraph consumer champion Katie Morley. 'I never trust that 'sale' prices are actually the cheapest.'
You can use various websites to compare prices at multiple retailers. Idealo compares prices, delivery costs and times and includes ratings so that you can judge sellers' bona fides. Price Spy and Price Runner also allow you to see price history, which you're highly advised to do (see below).
These comparison sites include second-hand models, which can be much cheaper, but should be weighed against how much you trust the seller. Telegraph Recommended staff have bought good-as-new refurbished tech at Amazon itself or at specialists such as Back Market, for lower prices than are seen during Prime Day on new items.
Category-specific sites such as Mattress Online, Air Con Centre and are also good places to look if you can't find deals at Amazon.
'However, don't forget to factor in the cost of postage and packaging when comparing prices, as expensive shipping fees sometimes can eat into perceived discounts,' Katie says. One Amazon Prime benefit is free next-day delivery.
2. Make sure prices are genuinely at their lowest
At Telegraph Recommended, we always calculate discounts against the average price, rather than the RRP (recommended retail price). Many products are never sold at their RRP and some only for brief periods of time to make a deal look more impressive.
When we look for the best deals on Amazon, we always check the price history. The graph above shows how the price of one television fluctuated over the last 12 months. Note that it was only sold at its full price for three extremely brief periods. It was at its lowest price for three slightly longer periods, corresponding to Prime Day, Black Friday and Christmas. The rest of the time it was somewhere in the middle. That's the average price you should calculate discounts against.
The source for this graph is CamelCamelCamel, a third-party price tracking site that we use to check price histories. Keepa does largely the same thing and both are specific to Amazon. Price Spy and Price Runner, mentioned above, allow you to check price histories across multiple retailers.
Here are some examples, showing how Amazon's claimed discounts make it hard to tell which deals are worth grabbing:
Oral-B iO2 electric toothbrush
An example of a genuine deal
Average price over the last six months: £77
Genuine discount: 11 per cent
Amazon have marked this as a 55 per cent discount based on an RRP of £100. We've checked the price history and found that the average price over the last six months is actually £77. Even so, the Prime Day price genuinely is 41 percent lower than usual. We'll accept this a genuine deal – especially since, even at full price, we think this the best value electric toothbrush you can get.
Tester Bethan King said: 'The battery lasted over a month—great for travel. The iO2's cleaning power, comfort and thoughtful features make it a standout choice for anyone wanting reliable results without overspending.
Amazon are advertising a 30 per cent discount on their QLED TV, based on an RRP of £500. But in fact it was only sold at that full price for one week in April. The rest of the time, it is sold for £340 or £350 and in the Spring sale went down to £300. You'd be highly advised to wait for it to drop back down to that price.
It's definitely worth the wait. In our round-up of the best 4K TVs our television expert, Chris Hall, called it the best smart 4K TV. Screen quality is superb for the price and it has a range of smart features, such as sensing the light levels in your room and tweaking the picture accordingly.
3. Shop at smart times
If an item you have your eye on is going to be discounted, it's likely the discount will be applied at the stroke of midnight. For Prime Day 2025, Amazon are calling these 'New Deal Drops'. They aren't announced in advance and in-demand products might have sold out by the time everyone else wakes up, so this can be a clever time to buy.
The early hours of the morning can also be a smart time to look for Lightning Deals. Prominently displayed on Amazon's deals page, these are limited-time deals where Amazon and third-party sellers make a limited inventory available at a lower price for a set time.
Some Lightning Deals can be as short as a few hours. Often the inventory sells out well before the period ends. Discounts here can be substantial but don't let haste prevent you from checking that the price is genuinely lower than usual and that it can't be bought cheaper elsewhere.
4. Use wish lists and price alerts
'Retailers love to create events because it gives them an excuse to sell higher volumes of the items they are looking to sell,' Katie says. These may not necessarily be the items you're looking to buy. Keep a cool head and focus on buying things you would have bought anyway, but at a better price.
One tip is to create a wish list. Log into your Amazon account. Select 'Accounts and Lists' from the top of the page. (On the Amazon app you'll find it behind the 'Me' tab at the bottom of the screen.) Create a list.
When you see something you like on Amazon, you can select 'Add to list' instead of 'Add to basket'. You can filter a list to show only the items with current deals. Checking it regularly could give you a head start on time-limited deals.
You can also enable Amazon deal notifications on your phone. Go to the 'Me' tab in the Amazon app and click the 'Settings' gearwheel to find the Notification settings. Within that, select 'Deals And Recommendations' and finally click 'Savings'.
All the price-checking sites mentioned above allow you to set price alerts on products as well. You choose the price you're prepared to pay and when it falls to that price or lower, you'll receive an alert.
5. Shop out of season
'Reductions are most likely when customer demand for seasonal items is lowest and retailers need to shift physical stock to make way for new items,' Katie says. 'For example, if you're buying Christmas decorations in January, or summer clothes in autumn. If you can take a longer-term approach with your shopping and buy ahead, this is how you'll snap up the best bargains.'
In the spring sales, look out for shopping deals on winter clothes, electric heaters and heated blankets to save a few pounds compared to buying on Black Friday.
Once Amazon Prime Day starts, we'll be identifying all the best deals and adding them to our top buyer's guides. If you see an eye-catching deal promoted elsewhere but not at Telegraph Recommended, that's a sign that our competitors aren't working quite as hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.
