Amazon Prime Day 2019: UK deals live now ahead of the 48-hour event

Visits: 2

Amazon Prime Day is held once a year and offers exclusive discounts to Amazon Prime members around the world. And this is year is set to be the biggest event yet and it kicks off in just four day’s time.

Amazon Prime Day 2019 will take place July 15th-16th. That’s right, we’re getting an epic 48-hour sale this year – a significant upgrade over the 36 hours last year. So get ready for a huge number of Prime Day deals – some of which have already begun.

If you’re not a Prime member yet, this is the best time of year to get it sorted as Amazon has just knocked £20 off the annual fee. Check out the full details of this limited-time deal.

Given summer can be a bit dry for deals, unless you want items for the garden at least, Prime Day is a fantastic opportunity for tech fans to pick up discounted bargains from their wish-list and enjoy them sooner rather than later. Black Friday is a long time away after all and sometimes the Prime Day deals are actually even better. 

You’re in the right place to learn everything you need to know about Amazon Prime Day 2019. We’ll tell you what deals to expect, what the best deals were last time and even what brilliant offers you can take advantage of right now as there are some early Amazon Prime Day deals appearing already. And if you want to get involved, we’ll tell you how to sign up for Amazon Prime membership for free.

What is Amazon Prime Day

Amazon Prime Day is a summer sales event on Amazon websites around the world where members of Amazon Prime get exclusive discounts on a huge range of items. It’s not just Amazon-branded items either (although they’re amongst the best deals for sure), lots of other manufacturers and third-party merchants save their best deals for Prime Day too, knowing millions of extra shoppers will be hitting the online store.

Why does Amazon have Prime Day? Sure, it’s a neat “thank you” for all it’s paying members. A thank you that involves giving Amazon more money. It’s a smart model to be honest. You need to either sign up for a free trial or be an existing member of Amazon Prime and people that keep the service either pay Amazon a monthly or annual fee giving Amazon a regular income source from them.

And it’s no co-incidence the best deals are found on Amazon’s items. Buy a Kindle and you’re going to keep buying ebooks from Amazon. Buy a Fire TV Stick you’re going to watch Prime Video (a great perk of membership) and maybe pay for the odd rental. Buy an Echo smart speaker and you’re into the Alexa family and helping Amazon fight off competition from Google’s rival Home devices.

How should I prepare for Amazon Prime Day?

Want to enjoy the best Prime Day deals? Then you have to be a member of Amazon Prime. If you’ve not been a member before, then our best advise is to sign up for a free 30-day trial. Given Prime Day is happening July 15th-16th, that free trial will last you right through the sale. 

You can totally cancel it anytime before the 30-day are up free of charge if you’re not bothered about the other perks of membership like free access to loads of TV show and movie content on Prime Video, free Kindle books/magazines, member-only discounts and super fast delivery options.

We’d also advise setting yourself a sensible budget aside and doing your research on what sort of items you’d like to keep an eye out for. If you have been thinking of getting an Amazon product, TV, set of headphones, bluetooth speakers, robot vacuum cleaner or any sort of tech really, holding on for a Prime Day deal is a solid shout as we see great deals on these items every year. We’re really not that far off now too. 

We’ve rounded up a list of our favourite Amazon Prime membership benefits. Take a look if you want to learn a bit more about what’s on offer for Prime members throughout the year.

What deals are live right now?

Just because those Prime Day deals are a while off yet we’re not waiting to bring you the best discounts. We’ve been able to dig out a few crackers already, it’s what we do here every day after all. So here’s a selection of the best deals we’ve seen at Amazon today. Stay tuned as we’ll keep updating this page with the best discounts all the way until Prime big day itself.

Amazon even gave us an early Prime members-only deal to get us going when it officially announced the Prime Day dates. The original Echo Show is down to £79.99 from £179.99. It’s for a refurbished model though. That’s….not a particularly great start to be honest, Amazon. We think you’re better off waiting for a Prime Day deal on the newer 2nd-gen Echo Show or maybe the smaller Echo Show 5 which we can see getting a tasty discount in the sale. 

We’ve had a look around on Amazon though, which of course has some super competitive deals going on throughout the year if you know where to look. These are our favourite pre-Prime Day deals you can buy right now.

When is Amazon Prime Day 2019?

Amazon Prime Day is July 15 and July 16, which makes the name a bit of a misnomer. No one is complaining about having a whole 48 hours to save money, though.

Amazon has steadily increased the time of its Prime Day sales year after year: it was 24 hours the first year, then 30 hours, and last year it was 36 hours. Now we’re in for a whole 48 hours, starting from July 15th next month. 

And let’s face it with the Amazon Black Friday deals event now lasting about a week, anything’s possible. Except sleep apparently if you’re a Deals Editor.

We’ll be front and centre for the entire thing to ensure you can see the best deals as navigating the messy array of deals and discounts that can be a bit exhausting directly on Amazon’s site. Fortunately, we’re used to trawling for deals there every day and we usually learn of the best deals way in advance, giving us plenty of time to prepare coverage for you.

What were the best-selling Prime Day items last year?

The online behemoth’s sales event of the summer was the biggest day of sales in its history last year, with over 89 million visits logged (10% more than in 2017). We can only see 2019 being even bigger.

Amazon sold over 100 million products around the world and over one million smart home devices – not just Amazon ones but Philips Hue lights, Hive thermostats and various manufacturers’ smart plugs. Prime Day was the biggest day ever for Echo devices, Fire tablets for kids, Kindle e-readers and Fire TV products.

Amazon said the two best-sellers worldwide were the Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote and the Echo Dot. Both of those items have actually been replaced with newer versions since – thankfully without a bump in RRP. So we totally expect the newer Amazon Echo Dot (3rd gen) and Fire TV Stick with the all-new Alexa voice remote (it now has extra buttons for volume control and gaming) to get similar discounts for the best prices of the year.

Other best-sellers included:

What were the best Prime Day deals last time?

As ever, some of the best Prime Day deals were on Amazon’s own devices, some of which have since been discontinued and replaced with new and improved models. The ever-popular Echo speakers were big hits with the following price drops:

Kindles and Fire Sticks and tablets received mouth-watering discounts too. The biggest surprise though was the never-previously-discounted Kindle Oasis dropping from £50 and the Paperwhite getting its lowest price yet. It just goes to show that the Prime Day deals on Amazon’s devices is the absolute best time to buy. Amazon has knocked £30 off since the slightly newer version arrived, but there’s room for a bigger price-cut on Prime Day itself.

The Fire TV Stick dropped to its lowest ever price while the already cheap Fire Tablets dropped significantly with the Fire 7 getting reduced to just £29.99. So yes, these are the deals to look out for again this year.

There were some cracking deals on TVs too, some of which are now even cheaper given TV deals in general are seriously competitive here in the UK. We saw 55-inch Ambilight OLED screens go from £1499 to £1199 (or just £999 today!). On the other end of the scale a 55-inch Hisense dropped to just £369, an all-time low at the time.

Mobile phone deals on Amazon Prime Day don’t make too many headlines, but if you’re willing to pay the upfront cost of a phone rather than go for a contract, there were certainly deals to be had last year. The then year-old Samsung Galaxy S8 dropped to £439. The Honor View 10 was just £338.99.  And the already very budget-friendly Moto G6 Play dropped to £135.99. So not the most modern or premium selection of handsets, but don’t bet against a wider range this year as more brands are keen to get involved each year

Here in the UK we saw plenty of other deals across multiple products. The biggest discounts were on coffee machines: many of them got 50% price cuts. Hive smart thermostats were 44% off, selected home security kits were 45% off and everything in the Amazon Warehouse section was 20% off. Chromebook fans got to snap up the excellent but terribly named Asus C202SA-GJ0027 for £99.99 instead of the usual £199.99.

(Image credit: ebuyer)

Will other retailers take part in Amazon Prime Day?

We have seen other stores in the UK try and cash in on the Amazon Prime Day fever by hosting their own deals. But in all honesty, they’ve regularly disappointed. 

However, if retailers do sell the same item that’s getting a great deal on Amazon, expect to see a lot of price-matching. This can be especially handy if you have a store-specific gift card burning a hole in you pocket. We see retailers price match Amazon on items like Fire sticks and Echo speakers throughout the year and some even go 99p cheaper to gain an advantage. 

John Lewis is worth a look as the store usually offer a minimum two-year guarantee on all electricals while most rivals stick with the standard one year. Currys, Argos and AO.com will be hoping to entice buyers to their sites too.

Hopefully electricals and computing specialists ebuyer will launch its Optimus Day again to rival Prime, which was a nice bit of Transformers humour for us last time around. Will Argos go for Megatron deals?

We also expect to see rivals to Amazon’s own devices go on sale. In particular, expect to see multiple discounts on the Google Home deals to match the equivalent Echo products.We see this sort of price-matching happen a lot during even basic sales during the year. Chances are, you’ll be able to get the best prices yet on Google’s smart speakers.

What could Amazon have done better on Prime Day?

It should have anticipated and been able to cope with the load not just on its ecommerce site but on its cloud services too: we weren’t the only ones irritated because we couldn’t get our Preacher fix on Amazon Prime Video. It’s all the more embarrassing when you remember that Amazon provides the cloud infrastructure for many high-profile sites and services: Prime Day wasn’t a great ad for that side of its business.

Our main criticisms aren’t technological, though. Navigating the deals was hopeless and many of the deals were laughable, especially in gaming: we frequently found much better console bundles on AO.com’s eBay page than we did on Amazon. 

Here’s a great example. On Prime Day, one of the flagship deals we identified was $50 off a set of Bose QuietComfort 25 headphones. That brought the price down from $299 to $249. Just three weeks later, Amazon US was listing the same headphones for $169.

Will Amazon Prime Day 2019 do things differently?

Yes. CNBC reports that Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s CEO of worldwide retail, has already demanded improvements to prevent a repeat the previous Prime Day’s capacity problems: “tech teams are already working to improve our architecture”. 

We’d like to think that Amazon will also improve the navigation and discoverability of its deals for Prime Day 2019, although we aren’t holding our collective breath: both factors’ general rubbishness didn’t stop Prime Day breaking all records, so there’s not much incentive for Amazon to change it unless it decides better navigation will drive significantly higher sales. But that’s why we’re here to show you the best Prime Day deals!

It’s a safe bet that Prime Day 2019 will be longer. It’s already grown from one day to one and a half; further inflation seems inevitable.

What does all this mean for Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

It’s clear that Amazon is prioritising Prime Day over Super Black Friday Deals Month or whatever convoluted name it’s going to give its Black Friday sales period in 2019: according to Digitalcommerce360.com, 67% of this year’s Prime Day deals were lower than comparable deals on the preceding Black Friday. 

That’s not to say Amazon won’t take part in Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It will, and it’ll offer the same kind of discounting that we’ve seen in recent years. But Prime Day is more important to the firm, and we’d expect its discounts to be deeper, especially on its own devices.

Prime Day: why does it matter more to Amazon?

There are some crucial differences between Prime Day and Black Friday. The first is that Prime Day is Amazon’s own day. It’s right there in the name, which of course refers to Amazon’s Prime membership programme and associated services. Amazon doesn’t own Black Friday, and that means ultimately it’s just another retailer shouting for attention – a massive retailer with a really loud voice, of course, but Black Friday is a sales event for the entire retail sector. It’s much harder for rivals to muscle in on something that Amazon has effectively created from thin air.

The second and more important difference is that Black Friday doesn’t create new spending. It just moves it slightly. As we’ve discovered in recent years, the money people spend over the Black Friday period is money they were probably going to spend anyway: all Black Friday really does is concentrates pre-Christmas shopping in the last week of November. 

Prime Day spending is different in two ways. First of all, people aren’t spending the money they’d already planned to spend on Christmas presents. And secondly, they’re buying mainly for themselves, not for others. If you go back to the list of bestsellers there’s an awful lot of impulse buying in there: Instant Pots and Hue Lightstrips, frying pans and dishwasher tablets. This is new spending, not merely moving pre-planned spending. 

There’s another key benefit for Amazon. Its best-sellers on Prime Day weren’t just Amazon devices; they were Amazon devices that connect to Amazon services. Fire TVs, Kindle Fires, Echo devices, Alexa remotes. Each one of them connecting to Amazon Prime, and each one of them requiring a Prime membership to buy in the first place. So when Black Friday rolls around, Amazon will have a whole bunch of Prime members for whom shopping on Prime is the default, and who might want to enhance their Amazon-powered smart homes with Amazon-branded Black Friday deals.

Prime Day means that for Amazon, Christmas now comes twice a year.

Read More Go To Source