Instead of Making Prime Day Better, Amazon Is Making It Longer

Amazon’s Prime Day is effectively becoming “Prime Week,” and consumers online will soon be plagued with enough “hot deals” to exhaust even the sturdiest Black Friday veteran. Instead of hosting a two-day sales extravaganza, Amazon is pushing the total days to four while promising an avalanche of timed deals exclusive to those who pony up for a Prime membership. As far as making its annual shopping holiday any more pro-consumer, that already seems to be far less important than taking over e-commerce for even longer than before.

Amazon’s once annual shopping event became a biannual sales spree last year, with one date booked for summertime and another that’s normally slated for October. Doubling the number of site-wide sales events didn’t improve the quality or honesty of the sales. It exacerbated lingering anti-consumer issues. Third-party sellers often jack up prices during sales, then offer steeper discounts to make a mere 10% discount seem like a 50% sale. We witnessed companies offer plenty of these faux markdowns during the last two Prime Days—from Expo dry erase markers to a giant ice tub. If you see any discount that promises more than 50% off, you can all but guarantee the real sale is probably closer to 10% or 20%.

Those who pay the $15 a month or $140 annually for a Prime membership will have more time to shop for their deals, but we seriously doubt Amazon has upped its quality standards to make each sale less opaque. Amazon will instead offer timed “themed daily deal drops” that only Prime members can see. Big brands like Samsung, Kiehl’s, and Levi’s should get special treatment, but some products will only be available for “a limited time.” Amazon implied it will offer these deals at five-minute intervals.

It will keep many deals posters busy, but there’s nothing here that implies Amazon will fix its opaque shopping UI. Gizmodo has an entire guide to help you avoid your worst impulses when you’ll inevitably see those sticker prices floating by July 8 through July 11. Webpages like CamelCamelCamel and phone apps like Keepa can offer better insight into how often a product goes on sale and whether you may be able to find it cheaper at a later date from Amazon or some other retailer.

The other big push this year beyond timed deals is Amazon’s AI “shopping assistant” chatbot named Rufus. The bot is supposed to offer buying guides tailored to your shopping whims. For Prime Day, you should be able to ask the AI questions about deals timing and receive recommendations. We seriously doubt it will offer any clarification about how often an item goes on sale and whether it makes more sense to wait for a better deal. For example, I ask Rufus about past deals for the Meta Quest 3. The headset with 128GB of storage went on sale last July for $430 instead of $500, but the bot said it doesn’t “have real-time information on sales or discounts.”

You have to remember that companies use these sales days to get rid of stock. Just a few months after last year’s Quest 3 sale, Meta discontinued the 128GB model and brought the 512GB Quest 3 to $500. It’s something to keep in mind if you see any tech companies offering big discounts for slightly older products. Amazon usually discounts its own Echo smart home and other Essentials products with relatively steep reductions, but the retail shopping giant itself will push its latest Echo Spot or Echo Dot devices down to or below its usual Prime Day prices—both before or during the holidays.

All these anti-consumer practices didn’t keep customers away, though. Amazon claimed last year’s July and October events were its “biggest ever” for those two dates, though the company didn’t offer dollar amounts for either shopping event. Adobe told Bloomberg shoppers spent 11% more on Prime Day deals in July 2024 than they did in 2023. The company’s quarterly earnings report after its October 2024 Prime Day claimed its net sales increased by 10% up through December compared to the same time in 2023. Amazon is simply capitalizing on consumers’ obsession with cheap goods, whether or not they’re actually cheap.

Prime Day started as a single 24-hour event in 2015, but the fake shopping holiday started running for two days in 2017. The retail giant expanded the number of deals hours continuously in the intervening years until we were stuck with 48 hours of Prime Day in 2019. All the while, the quality of the discounts from big and small brands has diminished. The inevitable next step is for Amazon to establish even more Prime Days, maybe even a full seven-day extravaganza that will become a true idol to consumerism.