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. Once the big day arrives, Polygon will be gathering the best deals on games, accessories, toys, and other associated nerdery that you can find on Amazon and at competing retailers.

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.

Track Prime Day price drops with these tools

CamelCamelCamel

CamelCamelCamel, as odd as the name is, remains one of the best tools for tracking price changes and history for products specifically on Amazon. 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.

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. It allows you to import your Amazon wishlist, and track pricing on specific products. While Keepa only tracks pricing history for Amazon products, its extension will automatically populate just about any product page with a detailed graph of price fluctuations over a set period of time. 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 and its accompanying extension allow you to track pricing history changes on specific products, but across a number of retailers, not just Amazon. Also, as an added bonus, Honey will also automatically search for promo codes when you check out at a supported retailer.

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. Just make sure to enable this feature if you want to take advantage.

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 is a great way to browse trending deals across broad categories, without having to set up alerts or even create an account.

Image: Alice Newcome-Beill

Get Alexa to remind you

For Prime Members who have an Echo smart speaker, you can opt-in to receive deal notifications on certain products up to 24 hours before they go live. The Alexa app can alert you to price drops on eligible products you have in your shopping cart, wishlist, or have saved for later.

To enable this feature, go to the notifications menu under settings in your Alexa mobile app, and open Amazon Shopping. In the Amazon Shopping menu, scroll down to Shopping Recommendations and turn on Deal 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.

Make sure to check out invite-only deals

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. You have to be invited first, but to be fair, it’s less of an invitation and more of a 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. The number of invite-only deals are pretty limited right now, but that may change as we get closer to Prime Day.

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. You can rest assured that plenty of other outlets will be competing for your attention around July 11, and while they may not offer drastically lower prices, retailers like Best Buy, Walmart, and Target all have price-matching policies that may be able to match those available on Amazon.

We’re here to help

If all of this is beginning to sound like a lot of work, don’t sweat it. The Polygon team will be highlighting all of the best gaming deals 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.