Does Amazon Prime Day Actually Save You Money?
I’ve long been a proponent of Amazon for buying all items for my house and generally everything. I was an Amazon Prime member for years because I liked the convenience of Amazon and the Amazon app.
Unfortunately, my stance on Amazon has changed slightly for my personal buying decisions and I wanted to explain here about Amazon, Amazon Prime, and Amazon Prime Day.
Key Takeaways
Amazon Prime Day is the two-day big sale event Amazon puts on only for it’s Prime members. If you are not a Prime member and you want to partake, you need to sign up for one of their 30-day free trails, which you can do during Prime Day.
Amazon Prime Day 2023 is July 11-12th for those interested in potential deals!
Are There Good Amazon Prime Day Deals?
This is the question I get most when they have learned I am no longer a Prime member, but to be honest, this is the first year I won’t be partaking in Amazon Prime Day. There are a few reasons, but over the course of the past few years, I found myself buying junk I didn’t need because it was “on sale” with Amazon Prime.
But was it really on sale? That’s the big question that I couldn’t answer easily. What was the price before it was a lightening deal on Amazon Prime Day?
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I couldn’t easily answer these questions when I was buying over the past few years. I do think there are some deals to be had, but Amazon has been accused of increasing prices before Prime Day in order to drop the price back down to inflate the “deal”.
This isn’t something that just Amazon does, but most retailers to be honest. Kohl’s is one of the worst for this tactic to make people think their merchandise is always on sale and you are getting a deal.
How You Can Check the Amazon Deal
If you don’t know what the price was before, then how can you know if you are actually getting a deal?
Amazon (and other retailers) do a great job at making you feel that the deal in front of you is “exclusive” and only for a short period of time. Many times, this is not the case and these deal are inflated with pricing tactics.
CamelCamelCamel
This is a funny name, but this website is what you want to use before Amazon Prime Day to make sure you aren’t getting shafted with the “deal”. This free website tracks pricing for millions of Amazon products and will show you how that pricing is, what it has been, and highs/lows. It’s a treasure-trove of information for you Amazon shoppers.
You can just put in the product URL from Amazon right into the search box at the top of the site and see what the historical pricing has been. This would be good to do on Amazon Prime Day itself.
Here is an example of a 8-pack of AA Amazon Basic batteries. I use this often and have large packs of them for stock supply. If you put the URL into CamelCamelCamel, you can see below that it has a high and low price and right now the pricing is right in the middle. These are supposed to be on sale for Amazon Prime Day so I can now track these easily to see if they actually drop and to what level.
Why I Cancelled My Amazon Prime Membership
Not exclusive to Amazon, but I have found over the years that Amazon was causing me to part from my money faster than I cared to. With their ease of use, fast shipping, and simple return process, shopping at Amazon has been a no-brainer for me. That was until earlier this year when I decided to look back at my last year of purchases.
I had 182 deliveries over one year!
Yes, you read that right, I ordered 182 things and I can’t even remember what most of them were. That was a big issue for me. Amazon had me so good with their app and recommendations that they could part me from my hard-earned money faster than an ice-cold beer is gone in the summer time. I had to make a change, so I decided to cancel my Prime membership.
We didn’t get much out of the Amazon video service since we already have Netflix, Hulu/Disney+ so we had enough streaming for our needs. So Amazon’s videos just didn’t get watched much.
I realize I’m not saving a ton of money per year from not having Prime (only about $150 per year), but where I am saving money is by not buying on Amazon unless I need to and since we are close to a big distribution facility, I still get my orders within 2 days for the most part.
Those 182 accounted for thousands of dollars over the last year and that’s where I save the most money. Since I realize now that most of those orders were just “because I was bored”, I know I will be saving a lot of money without Amazon Prime.
Now, I just hope I can keep my buying tendencies down when Amazon Prime Day starts this year.
Do you buy Amazon products on Prime Day? If so, have you gotten any good deals? Or at least perceived deals?
I’ve tracked it for the past 5 years just for what I had in my cart and lists using the same browser extension. Literally everything I have in one of my lists that I was considering, got marked up around a week or two before prime day and at best got marked back down to what it was already at, and I wish I would have taken screenshots, but it’s almost everything. 100% scam IME, the rare exception is some of those limited deal stuff, which some are extremely discounted, but those are the exception and usually very limited in the total available quantity.
Yeah, it’s pretty bad. Many retailers do this around Black Friday because people don’t pay attention to pricing. This browser extension is awesome for this kind of stuff. It lets you easily know if you are getting a deal. Amazon Prime Day is rarely a deal unless as you stated, it’s the few exceptions.