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Amazon has announced that its annual Prime Day event will take place on July 11th.
The third annual event will see the online retailer slash prices on "hundreds of thousands" of products exclusively for Prime members. The company promises that the event will be bigger than ever – quite literally, as the event kicks off at 6pm on the night of July 10th, taking Prime Day to actually being 30 hours long.
And to make sure that more shoppers can get in on the bounty of discounts on offer, Amazon has also cut the price of its popular Prime membership down to £59 (£20 off its usual £79 price tag) until July 3rd.
The big news this year (asides from the six extra hours of deals) is that the event is launching for the first time in China, India and Mexico – three countries where Prime only recently launched. In total, 13 countries will be participating, including the UK, US, Canada, Germany, Italy and Japan among others.
Last year’s Prime Day was Amazon’s biggest day ever as, even though there were multiple checkout glitches during peak times, it beat 2015’s inaugural event "by more than 60% worldwide".
The retailer has kept coy on what specific products will be discounted, but has said that it will organise the deals by theme (e.g. pet lovers, tecchies) in response to criticism around the ‘jumble sale’-like nature of the event. In addition, another complaint had been the low-quality items that were on offer in comparision to the big brand deals we see on Black Friday. While refraining from any specifics, Amazon has emphasised that this year will see big deals on TVs, with the Element 4K Ultra HD Smart LED – Amazon Fire TV Edition which is (you guessed it) the first TV with Fire TV OS built in.
Amazon hasn’t mentioned any of its own devices yet, but it’s extremely likely that there will be significant discounts on products like Kindles, Fire Tablets, Fire TV and Echo Speaker, the latter of which is seeing increased competition with the recent launch of Google Home and Apple’s upcoming Homepod.
“Our members love Prime Day and we were thrilled by the response over the last two years. It is inspiring us to make it even better this year for Prime members,” said Greg Greeley, vice president of Amazon Prime.
“Every side of our business is working to deliver more deals for a record number of shoppers. We even decided that 24 hours in a day just isn’t enough time to shop all of the great deals – so we’re giving Prime members 30 hours to shop on Prime Day!”
Prime members don’t need to wait until the evening of July 10th to take advantage of deals though. The company is offering four months of its Music Unimited service for £0.99 right away for new subscibers.
