On the days of 21 and 22 June, subscribers to the Amazon Prime program will be able to access numerous exclusive offers on the occasion of Prime Day 2021. The two-day discount was usually held in July, but for logistical reasons related to the Covid-19 emergency the ecommerce giant last year delayed the initiative until October, while this year it brought it forward to June.
The discounts are reserved only for members of Prime, the Amazon subscription that guarantees free and fast deliveries and access to the company’s digital services, such as Prime Video. In Italy the service costs € 36 per year or € 3.99 per month. As always, you can find many good deals, but it is still good to be careful: the discounts advertised are often not really unrepeatable and are above all calculated not on the average price of the product up to now, but on the original list price, which dates back to first insertion of the product into the system.
If a smart scale costs for example 103.95 euros instead of 179.95 euros (the undiscounted crossed out price that you see in the description), it does not always mean that that specific product cost one hundred euros more until the day before, but that is course a discount equal to that amount compared to the original list price. Maybe the final price remains very good (in this specific case, in fact, it is), but often the discount we are really accessing is not as extraordinary as Amazon presents it.
CamelCamelCamel
To really find out what the average price of a product on Amazon is (and therefore what is the real discount we are taking advantage of) there are several useful tools. The most famous is CamelCamelCamel. It is a real archive of the prices of all (or almost) Amazon products that allows you to access a history of the price list of a specific object. To start a search just copy the address of the Amazon page we are viewing, paste it in the search field at the top and press enter: the system will immediately show us a graph with the price trend. In the case of the scale in our example, CamelCamelCamel suggests that the price of € 103.95 is actually good. The product has an average price on Amazon of about 145 euros, which, as we wanted to prove, are still less than the “list” 179.95 euros. However, there have been rare cases, in the past, in which the product has come to cost even less (about 94 euros). The site also allows you to enter an email and indicate a fixed price in the fields immediately above the graph, on the results page: in this way it will be possible to receive a message every time the product touches the price indicated by us. CamelCamelCamel prices are not always up-to-date (so beware of any discrepancies), but the system remains very useful for checking any offers from previous weeks and months.
Keepa
Another equally valid tool is Keepa, which in addition to the price history also offers very useful graphs on the performance of the product in the ranking and allows a more precise analysis of past offers. Keepa also provides the ability to check eBay bids for the same product and makes it easy to search for thrift dealers. The operation is the same: open the page, copy the product address on Amazon and press enter to view the offer history.
To simplify the display of prices directly on the Amazon page, both Keepa and CamelCamelCamel provide extensions for the Chrome and Firefox browsers with which it is possible to view charts and price information directly from the Amazon product page. To install them just follow the links connected to the icons of the major browsers from the Keepa and CamelCamelCamel home page.
Check prices on other ecommerce
The last thing to do before hitting the buy button on an offer is to check the product prices at other online retailers. To do this, you can use sites such as Trovaprezzo, one of the most famous in Italy, or Idealo (which has also been offering a tool for checking the price history for some time). For non-niche products it is usually difficult to find prices lower than that offered by Amazon, which can count on a much larger sales scale, but a quick search allows you to verify this and be sure that the Prime Day offer is actually the best. .
the interview
Jamil Ghani, vice president of Amazon: “Prime Day will be June 21-22”
by Simone Cosimi
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