A PRIMER ON HOW TO GET TOP DEALS ON AMAZON’S PRIME DAY
The off-season sale SAN FRANCISCO Amazon calls Prime Day hits Tuesday.
If you’re thinking of taking part, you’ll save money and time by planning ahead.
Here’s how to prepare yourself ahead of the marketing bonanza.
DECIDE IF PRIME IS WORTH IT
Amazon says it will offer more than 100,000 deals over the course of the day, more than twice the number offered last year.
The catch: The deals are available only to members of Amazon Prime, the Seattle company’s $99-a-year membership program that offers free two-day (and sometimes one- and same-day) shipping as well other perks, including streaming video, music and photo storage.
If you’re not already a Prime member, you first need to decide whether you’d save enough to make up for buying a membership.
That said, it’s also possible to sign up for a free 30-day trial, then cancel after Prime Day. Amazon’s betting you’ll be so blown away you’ll stick around.
MAKE A LIST
The whole idea is to save money, so while shopping for the sake of shopping might shore up the U.S. economy as a whole, it won’t do much for your own bottom line. Spend some time thinking of bigger-ticket items you need over the next six months or so.
If you have adequate storage space, holiday shopping can also figure into that. Also include household items you know you’ll need more of. Last year’s Prime Day included things such as vitamins and snow shovels. While not sexy or even thrilling, if you need a snow shovel you need a snow shovel, so why not save money buying it?
CHECK IT — TWICE
Go online and tool around a little, checking to see what brand, make and model of those items you want. Read some reviews, get a sense for what’s out there. Once you’ve narrowed your range, add them to your list.
Now hit a couple of likely sites and get some ballpark prices for those items. You can also search by the item’s specific name on Google, Bing or Yahoo and see a fairly wide range of options.
It’s helpful to go back a second day and rerun at least the bigger-ticket items, as sometimes prices can vary from one day to the next.
Armed with your master shopping list of prices, you’ll be in a strong position to evaluate deals as they are launched.
CHECK OUT RIVALS
While Amazon began running a few prePrime Day deals Wednesday, the real blizzard will be the 24 hours beginning at midnight Tuesday, Seattle time.
But Amazon’s not the only company offering sales in the week leading up to the event. A host of others have jumped on the bandwagon.
So it’s worth looking around on some of the bigger retailers, especially Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Macy’s, to see if they’ve got any deals going already.
APP IT
A must-have for this exercise is the Amazon app on your phone, which allows you to set a watch list of products. It will notify you just before they go on sale. To sign up, tap “notifications” (this may be in Settings) in the app menu and enable Your Watched & Waitlisted Deals.
You can also add items to your Amazon shopping list or wish list. Amazon will alert you if any of the items in your list are available at a lower price.
There are also other apps you might want to get. A popular one is CamelCamelCamel, which allows you to look at an item’s price history on Amazon. So when a deal pops up during Prime Day, you can see if it really is a deal. You can also set it to alert you when the price of an item you’re interested in on Amazon falls below a certain point you set.
ASK ALEXA
Owners of an Amazon Alexa device, such as the Echo, Dot or Tap, will want to ask the digital assistant if she knows of any Prime Day deals. On Wednesday, she began responding with this poem: “Tell secrets I cannot, But since you ask, This hint is what I’ve got. On July 8, early birds get their meal, So ask me then, and I will reveal some deals.”
Maybe you’re among the lucky ones to have already wormed your way into deals over the weekend.
FIND A SHOPPING BUDDY
Let’s hope you don’t plan to spend the entire 24-hour period of the sale online, relentlessly hitting the refresh button.
You can socialize the whole online shopping experience by getting a shopping buddy or three. Find a group of people, distribute your lists among yourselves and then have everyone sign up for shifts. That way you don’t have to skip that important meeting at work or a hot date just to make sure you aren’t missing the all-important hedge trimmer your backyard so desperately needs.