The best ways to track and compare deals on Prime Day 2.0

A long time ago—well, 2016, if we’re being precise—Prime Day kept true to its name and was a 24-hour event. This year, the retailer’s special shopping events will span four days.

The second coming of Prime Day 2022, kicking off from October 11–12,  is meant to give shoppers a headstart on the holiday season—and presumably help bolster Amazon’s Q4 revenue. Technically, the event is called “Amazon’s Prime Early Access Sale,” but to those of us outside of the marketing department, it’s Prime Day 2.0. And it has some familiar early deals: up to 70% off Amazon devices, like Fire TV, Eero mesh Web devices and Echo, and low prices on television sets. (You can already find some preview deals here.)

Just like Prime Day forerunners, keeping up with the deals will likely be a challenge, even for the most dedicated of bargain hunters. No one has the time to monitor all of the upcoming avalanche of deals. And, just to make things more complicated, sometimes the sale price actually isn’t that good of a deal anyway.

So what’s a shopper to do? The good news is there are plenty of tools, both native to Amazon and via third-parties, that can help you grab the item you want at the best possible price.

Alexa

Amazon’s Echo devices are often a good source of Prime Day specials. Just ask “Alexa, what are my Prime Day deals?” on October 11 and 12 to get a summary of the latest offerings. (Past specials have included Amazon Smart Plugs for $5 versus their usual price of $25.) You’ll need to enable voice purchasing to take advantage of the deals. 

Amazon app

If you haven’t already, download Amazon’s app (available for Android and iOS), it’s a good idea to do so now. You’ll get a “sneak peek” on select deals, as well as upcoming Lightning Deals that only last for a short period of time. You can also create a list of upcoming specials and get alerts before they go live. Go to the app’s settings menu, click notifications, and toggle alerts on for “Your Watched and Waitlisted Deals.”

CamelCamelCamel.com

By the marketing hype, you’d think Prime Day-like deals are the best of the year. And the fact that Amazon is promoting the Prime Early Access Sale as an advance Black Friday sale only reinforces those beliefs. And, yes, a lot of the prices on Prime Day do offer significant discounts, but not always.

CamelCamelCamel follows the price history of pretty much every product on Amazon, tracking its all-time high and low price and giving shoppers some perspective. You can also set alerts to find out when the price of your item of interest drops to a certain point. And the browser extension (“The Camelizer”) lets you examine pricing trends without leaving the Amazon site. (Note that this site is only good for Amazon prices. It won’t help with any of the other retailers offering deals of their own.)

PayPal Honey

This browser extension, much like CamelCamelCamel, lets you track prices and will send an alert when it sees a deal. On top of that, it will hunt for discount codes that could drop the price lower. The downside: It can slow down the purchase process sometimes as it hunts through those codes.

Other deal hunting sites

Crowdsourcing is sometimes the best way to keep track of all the deals, especially if you’re wading into the Prime Early Access Sale without a specific shopping list. Sites like SlickDeals.net and Offers.com, are invaluable as like-minded bargain hunters let each other know as they find good deals.