How to find the best Prime Day deals

Amazon Prime Day 2023 is happening on July 11 and July 12, but there are already some solid early Prime Day deals you can get, including invite-only deals on some of Amazon’s Fire TVs and more. Polygon, once the day comes, will gather the best offers on toys, games, accessories and more that can be found on Amazon.

However, if you’re more interested in how to scope out the best deals yourself, there are some excellent tools available for keeping tabs on price cuts. Below, we’ve outlined some of our favorite free apps along with some helpful strategies to ensure that you don’t miss out on any discounts for your favorite products.

These tools will help you track Prime Day discounts

CamelCamelCamel

CamelCamelCamel is a great tool for keeping track of price history and changes for Amazon products. While you don’t need an account to see pricing information available through the app, making a profile will allow you to set up watchlists and get e-mail price alerts for your favorite products. You’re welcome to manually populate your own watchlist, but the app also allows you to import any existing Amazon wishlist into your CamelCamelCamel profile.

Image: Alice Newcome-Beill

CamelCamelCamel and the Camelizer browser extension link to this please only provide information for products on Amazon though, so you’ll need a different set of tools if you’re shopping at Best Buy, Target, GameStop, or elsewhere during Prime Day.

Keepa

Finally, we have the Keepa extension, which isn’t too different from CamelCamelCamel. You can import your Amazon wishlist and keep track of pricing for specific products. Keepa does not track pricing for Amazon products. However, the extension populates any product’s page with an accurate graph that shows price fluctuation over a specified period. Opening the “Track Product” tab will allow you to establish alerts that notify you when a product matches or drops below a certain price, much like other tracking tools.

Image: Alice Newcome-Beill

Honey

Honey, along with its extension, allows you to keep track of price changes for specific products. This is possible across many retailers, and not just Amazon. Honey also searches for discount codes automatically when you are checking out with a retailer that supports it.

Image: Alice Newcome-Beill

While setting up a Honey account doesn’t allow you to import existing wishlists from other retailers, its Smart Droplist feature will automatically populate your Droplist with items in your “Saved for later” cart on Amazon, and will also track the price of frequently viewed items on certain retailers. If you’d like to use this feature, make sure that it is enabled.

Slickdeals

If you prefer a more hands-on approach when it comes to searching for deals, Slickdeals is a frequently updated collection of some of the best discounts on a wide variety of products, vetted by the site’s community of users. While it won’t let you track pricing for specific products, you can set up notifications for deals that match specific keywords, or have a certain level of popularity among Slickdeals users. Slickdeals offers a way for you to find the latest deals in broad categories. You don’t have to create an account, or set up any alerts.

Image: Alice Newcome-Beill

Alexa can remind you.

You can receive deals notifications up to 24 hours before the products go live if you are a Prime Member with an Echo smart speaker. Alexa can notify you of price changes on products that you’ve saved, added to your wish list, or placed in your cart.

Go to your Alexa App’s notification menu and then open Amazon Shopping. To enable Deal Recommendations in the Amazon Shopping Menu, go to Shopping Recommendations. Just note that enabling this feature won’t have Alexa chime in when a product goes on sale, but you’ll still get a yellow notification ring on your Echo devices, in addition to an alert on your mobile device.

Check out the invite-only offers

As we mentioned at the top of this post, Amazon has already made some excellent Prime Day deals available for a couple of Fire TVs and other products, too, but there’s a catch for some of them. First, you have to request an invite, which is less like an invitation than a simple request. Just find a participating product, and click “Request Invite”. If Amazon is able to fulfill your order, you’ll receive an email notification on Prime Day with instructions on how to check out with your exclusive loot. Although the number of deals available to invitees is limited, this may increase as Prime Day approaches.

Prime Day isn’t just for Amazon anymore

Just in case Amazon hasn’t discounted a particular product you’ve been looking for, you might want to check out what deals are being offered at other retailers. There will be plenty of outlets competing to get your attention on July 11. While they might not be offering prices that are drastically cheaper, Best Buy, Walmart and Target have policies for price matching that could match Amazon’s.

We’re here to help

If all of this is beginning to sound like a lot of work, don’t sweat it. Polygon will highlight all the best deals in gaming on Prime Day, and beyond. If you’d prefer to have us do the heavy lifting, go ahead and bookmark our main Prime Day landing page for up-to-date coverage happening between now and July 11.