What to Expect for Amazon Prime Day 2024

Amazon Prime Day started in 2015 and has become an annual two-day sale. Aside from a few outliers tied to the pandemic, Prime Day usually takes place in mid-July. In 2022 Amazon added a second two-day sale in October to kick off the holiday shopping season. In 2024 it introduced a third sitewide sale: the Big Spring Sale, the first that didn’t require a Prime membership.

Amazon typically promotes early deals, discounts, and other promotions in the days leading up to its big events. There are usually offers across multiple categories from all sorts of brands, including Amazon’s own lineup of devices like Echo smart speakers, Fire tablets, Fire TVs, and Kindle e-readers, as well as its smart home brand Ring and its WiFi router brand Eero. We also often see special offers for first-time Prime subscribers to Amazon’s services, such as Prime Video, Amazon Music, and Kindle Unlimited. Consumer Reports will be keeping an eye on all of Amazon’s sale offerings to bring you the latest deals, so bookmark our Deals Hub and check back often.

Prime Day typically brings price drops on popular items like headphones, robotic vacuums, smartwatches, and mattresses, as well as apparel, household goods, back-to-school supplies, electronics, toys, and more. For these big sales, Amazon touts hundreds of thousands of deals, including discounts on popular seasonal and gift items, and this new savings event is unlikely to be different.

With all Amazon sale events, not all discounts are guaranteed to be available for the duration of the sale. There may be Lightning Deals every hour throughout the sale, which have countdown clocks, encouraging shoppers to buy quickly rather than miss them. Other sales may end without warning if items go out of stock. For more on how to get the best deals, check out our tips.

Consumer Reports’ product experts will be tracking all the deals and sharing the best offers on top-tested products.

Since Amazon’s first sitewide event, there have been big sales at other major stores coinciding with Prime Day. Many retailers will refer to this as Black Friday in July, while others may just keep things simple and refer to their events as summer sales. But no matter what names they use, their prices tend to rival Amazon’s, which means you can shop at your preferred store and still get the same or similar pricing on many of the items.

Consumer Reports will be keeping an eye on all of these retailers and more to help you find the best prices on quality products.

If you’re not already a Prime member, you’ll need to sign up to access this sale. (Check the Amazon policy on free trial memberships.) You can add items to a shopping list or even to your cart (you can always move them to “saved for later”) so that you can quickly access them during the sale to see whether they’re available at a discount.

Consumer Reports is tracking all the deals available before and during Prime Day. We’ll be comparing prices on CR-tested products with each product’s typical cost, as well as watching the prices at other retailers, to help you avoid overspending or buying something that doesn’t work well. You can also take a look at CR’s Deals hub for the latest and best deals from Amazon and other major retailers leading up to and during the big sale event.