Amazon Prime Day 2023 – some deals still live

Many deals are gone, as we’ve noted, but these are the ones still worth casting your eye over:

• Garmin Forerunner 245 –  still £158 (even cheaper)
• iPhone 14 Pro Max (256GB) – still £1,169
• Sony WH-1000XM4 headphones – still £199
• Fitbit Charge 5 Activity Tracker – now £99 (often higher)
• DeWalt Magnetic Screwdriver Bit Accessory Set – still £9.47
• Kenwood kMix Stand Mixer – still £229
• Chivas Regal 13-year-old scotch whisky – still £25
• Chromecast with Google TV (4K) – still £44
• Google Pixel 7 (128GB) – Obsidian – still £445

We’re also sifting through the deals in the sections below – we’ve employed the brains and deals-spotting talents of our experts in each section to show you the deals that are worth checking out, but hurry as they’ll be gone soon (if not already).

While the excellent Spear and Jackson secateurs are back to the normal price,  we’ve got the most popular Prime Day deals under £30 on Saga Exceptional that are still running.

Save £2: It’s very rare to see a discount on anything DeWalt, so it’s worth taking advantage of the discount on this handy set. It contains 32 different screw bits to meet your specific needs, and a quick-change bit holder to help you transfer those fiddly magnetic heads into the drill driver. Homes Editor-in-Chief Amy Cutmore is a DeWalt fan, and is happy to see the box will fit into her DeWalt TSTAK storage system. If you’re forever losing or damaging bits, this is for you. 

We’ve unleashed the experts for our kitchen selection, with Homes Editor in Chief Amy Cutmore rounding up the best deals from the Prime Day sales event – and a few still remain.

Save £250.99: If you love a retro-inspired bit of kit for your kitchen, then the Kenwood kMix is for you. With a selection of non-stick attachments such as a balloon whisk, dough hook and K-beater, you’ll be able to make bread dough and mix cake batter easily. A handy fold functionality means you can create lighter mixtures like brioche and mousse. The baking tools are dishwasher safe – and while the sale has ended, this is still a good price for this sough-after stand mixer.

Save £12: If a blended whisky is more your thing, then this offer should suit your taste buds and your wallet. Part of the Chivas Regal Extra 13 range this one spends a little bit of its time in a tequila cask to give it a few tropical notes. A little more expensive post-Prime Day, but not by much.

Our Senior Coaching Editor, Paul Larkins, highlights his top deals for runners in this year’s Prime Day sales – with one of his special picks even lower than before.

Save £40: The Forerunner hit its lowest ever price, again during Amazon’s sales event – and inexplicably is lower post Prime Day. Larkins loves this deal for any budding runners. “Now this really is a killer deal. Go for it. The Forerunner 245 will keep you up to date with everything you need as a runner, and it’s easily my favourite brand for running watches.”

Whether you’re after a new TV, speaker or a stick to make your current television ‘smart’, our Senior Home Tech Editor Jayne Cherrington-Cook has plucked the best Prime Day deals for you.

Save £16: If you’re looking for a cheap and easy-to-use streaming device, the Chromecast with Google TV is for you. Connect via the internet to access all your favourite streaming services from Netflix to BTSport. Not only can you control it with your voice and remote, but it’s compatible with 4K televisions, allowing you high quality viewing of your favourite shows and movies. It’s gone up £4 since Prime Day, but it’s still on the cheaper side of the cost it’s been offered for previously.

Our Senior Home Tech Editor Jayne Cherrington-Cook is back, but with her listening ears on, to give you the ultimate guide to audio deals on Prime Day.

Save £20: I’ve been reviewing tech for a long time, and Sony’s WH-1000XM4 headphones have consistently been a high performer. They’re not the latest model anymore, but for comfort, noise cancellation and sound quality these are still hard to beat. In recent months I’ve seen them around the £220-£250 (versus an original RRP of £350), and during the first day of the Prime sale, they finally went below £200 – and (somehow) they’ve stayed there.

Our Chief Content Officer (and previously Phones Editor of TechRadar), Gareth Beavis, casts his expert eye over the crop of smartphone savings on Prime Day.

Save £65: The iPhone 14 Pro Max is the absolute best iPhone Apple’s ever made – yes, it’s a larger device, but that makes it more like an iPad in the pocket and it brings a much longer battery life. The cameras on the Pro range are market-leading, and although it’s not just a ‘good’ price rather than the amazing £1,110 it was during price, this is still lower than the iPhone 14 Pro Max usually is (although be warned: the iPhone 15 is likely coming in September, and could bring new features you might want to invest in). 

Save £55: This deal actually preceded Prime Day (well, it dropped by £2 at midnight, and has had a further £1 reduction, but that’s not too exciting), and has now proceeded it too. But it’s still worth checking out – the Pixel 7 is the latest phone from the search giant, with the one of the cleanest smartphone interfaces out there. The camera (as the name suggests) is truly stellar, the battery life is pretty decent and while it’s not got the grunt of the Pixel 7 Pro, it’s got a much bigger discount right now. 

Save £40: The Samsung A14, with its neat design and longer-than-expected battery life is definitely worth a look. I use a Samsung phone and find the interface neat and usable, and while you won’t get the raw speed and full-power cameras here, you will find a usable and great value smartphone – especially for this price. Definitely one to consider if you’ve been holding out for a new, but cheaper, phone deal. 

Amazon invented Prime Day in 2015 to celebrate the firm’s 20th birthday. The first Prime Day was a big success, selling over 24,000 Instant Pot pressure cookers and accounting for the highest ever sales of Amazon-branded devices such as Kindle e-book readers and Alexa speakers. 

Amazon liked the results so much it decided to bring back Prime Day the following year. This time it sold 215,000 Instant Pots and once again recorded record sales of its own devices. So Prime Day became an annual event, doubling in duration and offering an even wider range of discounts.

By 2022, Prime Day was selling 100,000 items per minute. According to Amazon, Prime Day deals saved customers a whopping $1.7 billion – although as we’ll discover, that figure’s not as clear-cut as Amazon might have you believe.

This year saw a similar upswing of deals, with a few real-time savings to be had throughout the two-day event.

Billed as “a global shopping event with deals exclusively for Amazon Prime members”, it’s a sales event when Amazon heavily discounts its own products – Kindle e-readers, Echo speakers, Fire TV devices, Fire tablets, Ring security cameras and more – as well as thousands of products from third party firms.

Some of the discounts are very big, but many of them are for brands and products you’ve never heard about, so it’s important to understand what you’re looking for and do some research about whether these are ‘true’ deals. 

“The thing is with Prime Day is just how busy it all is” says Gareth Beavis, Chief Content Officer for Saga Exceptional, who’s been covering the sales event since its inception.

“That’s why we’re investing time and resource into sifting through the deals, working out which are truly beneficial and trying to bring some order to the chaos – so you don’t spend hundreds of pounds on products that aren’t what you need.”  

Confusingly, Prime Day is actually two days: July 11 and July 12 2023. It’s a 48-hour event and it started at one minute past midnight on Tuesday, July 11.  

That’s when you’ll see the majority of Prime Day deals. However, we (as usual) saw some Prime Day deals before the Prime Day event begins, and some deals will carry on afterwards.

We’re already seeing some of that this year: Amazon Music has increased its one month free trial period to four months in a deal that’s available now and ends on July 13.

It’s wise to think in advance about what you might want to buy – security cameras? Smart speakers? A tablet? Nice headphones? – and research the market a little bit to find out what product(s) you like and what they usually cost.  

That cost is very important, because deals screaming “40% off!” or “save £500!” are based on the recommended retail price (RRP) – and most of the time, products haven’t been listed at RRP for a while

You see this a lot on more expensive items such as TVs, so for example you might see a TV listed with £500 off the normal selling price – but if you shop around you’ll often find that nobody else is selling it at the full recommended retail price either, and that was the case this year.

Another common sales tactic is to do big discounts on products that have reached the end of their sales life – so, for example, when Sony brings out a new pair of wireless headphones, Apple updates its Macs or Samsung launches a new phone, you’ll see sizable discounts on the outgoing models.

Those deals look amazing when you compare the current price to the RRP, but the RRP is from when those products first launched. 

That’s where our two secret weapons come in. CamelCamelCamel.com enables you to copy an Amazon page to see the product’s price history, so you can see if the current deal is like those supermarket wine promotions where the price was hiked for a few weeks before coming back down and getting a yellow sticker.

And PriceSpy.co.uk and Pricerunner UK enable you to search other retailers to see what the market price is for a particular product. Together those sites make it easy to see how genuine a deal is, and we’d always recommend you check everything first to make sure you’re getting a real discount.

Every year, before Prime Day starts, you can sign up for a free trial if you haven’t been a Prime member in the last 12 months.  

There are two kinds of deals you’ll see as a Prime Member: limited time deals, which are discounts that are available until the product is sold out, and Lightning Deals, which are timetabled and usually fairly short promotions. Non-Prime members don’t get to see those deals when they shop. 

If you’re on board with signing up to paying Amazon monthly, there are many benefits to be had – not just free shipping on a number of products and access to the sales during Prime Day.

Many of our team enjoy Prime Video, which comes bundled (and the fee for Prime, even without all the other benefits, is cheaper than something like Netflix). There’s more of a focus on movies and you’ll also get a few Premier League games per year, with sharp streaming quality.

Prime Reading brings a library to your Kindle, smartphone or tablet – we’re big fans of this one, where you can get over a thousand ebooks and magazines directly to your device. It’s not extensive, but we have found a gem or two on there and it’s a handy freebie.

Amazon Music Prime isn’t quite a Spotify rival, but does have a large catalogue of music as well as a number of podcasts. These aren’t exclusive, but through the app you can get things like the wonderful Off Menu ad-free.

Prime Gaming is great if you, your children or grandchildren are into gaming – it offers access to a collection of PC games and a Twitch channel subscription for watching others play or give their thoughts on the wider world.

Same day grocery delivery from the likes of Amazon Fresh and Morrisons is included, with specific hour slots and is dropped off by the usual Amazon delivery drivers in large paper bags).

Deliveroo Plus – if you’re often ordering takeaway through Deliveroo, then this is a winner – no delivery charges for orders over £25 (although remember to tip).

While the value of all the elements of Prime above is extensive, always think about affordability and what you’ll actually use – it could be that with a little extra planning, you could save more by just using the services when you need them.

Go to Amazon Prime and select Start My Free Trial. You’ll need to provide payment details, but Amazon won’t charge you until the trial period ends. Provided you cancel before the 30 days are up you won’t pay a penny. 

If you decide you like Prime, you can subscribe for £8.99 per month or £95 per year. That gives you Amazon Household, which enables you to share your membership with other household members.

An Amazon Household can contain up to two adults, each with their own Amazon account, and up to four children. Children can’t use their Prime access to shop for products but they can access age-appropriate content such as TV shows and movies. 

Black Friday and Cyber Monday don’t ‘belong’ to anybody, and as a result pretty much every company – including Amazon – runs Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions.

With Prime Day, Amazon has effectively created its own private Black Friday where only Amazon Prime members are welcome.

In addition to selling products, that’s a good way of encouraging more people to sign up for Prime.