Prime Day Done Right

Last year most viewed Amazon Prime Day as nothing more than a ploy as the online retailer didn’t really offer up any of the amazing deals that everyone was expecting. While I didn’t have as strong a response last year, there was clearly room for improvement as I only found a few items that were of interest with most of those small purchases being for my son. When all was said and done, the real deals were on items that only a few people were looking to purchase while the rest of us not finding any discounts beyond that which we have been seeing for years in the daily deals. This was the expectation that many of us had when Amazon announced that they would, once again, have an Amazon Prime Day on July 12^th.

This was probably why it wasn’t until later in the morning when I decided to log into my account and see if there was anything that piqued my interest. Scrolling through the pages upon pages of discounted products I did find a couple that I considered purchasing and subsequently added them to my cart. However, none of those things I would qualify as anything that I needed to purchase so I decided to take a closer look at some of the things that my wife and I had been looking to purchase that were, at the time, saved in my cart for future consideration.

It was in these items, varied as they may be, that I noticed the huge difference between the flop last year and the vastly improved experience this time around. While I couldn’t find anything that was singled out as a deal, I did find that most of the products and items in my cart were part of a larger category or collection of items that were being offered at 10, 20, and 30 percent off. This is the kind of sale that many of us were looking for last year and were now ready to take advantage of this summer.

And this didn’t just apply to the new items. I also noticed that many categories in the “Amazon Warehouse” carried with them the same discount. The compounded savings on a few items finally pushed me to purchase some of the things that I had been thinking about for some time and now, at nearly 70 and 80 percent off, it was definitely the time to buy.

It may not have seemed likely but Amazon did actually learn something from the tepid response that they received the first time around and now, it is safe to say, most of us are looking forward to how they will improve the experience in the years to come. Of course, those beyond the 1 hour delivery areas are just waiting for our packages to arrive. And some of us are just letting them take their time so that we can further our frugality just a little bit more with the digital credits we are earning because we are willing to wait. Safe to say that next week should be an interesting UPS experience.