Prime Day 2026 runs 23 to 26 June, and the deals are a mixed bag. This is how to tell a genuine bargain from a discount built on an inflated price.
We first published this article last year, and it still holds true. The phrase 'Do your research' has become a byword for just looking up anything on YouTube and concluding that wind turbines are slowing the Earth's rotation and other stupidities. But when it comes to looking at online sales prices it couldn't be more appropriate.
The concept of a sale is probably as old as capitalism itself. If so, the concept of hoodwinking consumers into buying stuff that is not actually discounted is roughly the same age. There are what can only be described as shenanigans taking place surrounding events such as Prime Day.
Back in 2023, the UK's consumer advocacy group Which? concluded that only 2% of Black Friday deals were the lowest price products had been offered that year. Last year we analysed a popular website's 50 or so recommended Amazon Prime Day deals in the photography and video space and found a decidedly mixed bag of results.
US tariff charges complicated the picture a bit, but on the whole the deals on offer fell into three categories.
There are fewer of these than you might hope. A good starting place is to look for official campaigns. Some manufacturers offer steep discounts via their Amazon and online shops this year, and it's always worth cross-referencing.
This is a wide category: a low price that has been reached before, often fairly recently. The point here is that it's not a once in a lifetime offer and the product you're after is likely to appear at that price again. It might even be available cheaper next month as retailers try to boost the market during the sluggish northern hemisphere holiday season.
Bargains that are essentially measured against artificially high previous prices. Last year, we found one normally $2,198 Sony camera that had been offered at $2,698 for a whole 7 days before being back down at $2,198 once more. That allowed the retailer to slap a pert 19% off label on it. Technically true, but...
Here's an ironic link to the Amazon.com listing of Cory Doctorow's recent book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. Among many other things, it details some of the sharp practices Amazon employs to separate you from your money.
There are tools that you can use to sift out the genuine offers from the simple grifting though. Price trackers such as Keepa or CamelCamelCamel will analyse Amazon listings and report back on whether a bargain is a genuine one or not. They'll also offer you future price alerts if you want to track prices moving forward.
Websites such as RateBud and others, meanwhile, let you sift through the avalanche of 5 star AI-slop reviews to discover products that might genuinely match your needs. Even bog-standard genAI chatbots will give you a better steer on products than just heading in cold or relying on retailers own 'helpful' chatbots.
In short, tool up, keep your wits about you, and remember the old adage that if a thing looks too good to be true, there's normally a reason for that...