Amazon Prime Day 2021: how to find the best tech deals

Outside of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Prime Day has become one of the biggest shopping events of the year. It’s a two-day stretch wherein Amazon Prime members will likely find some of the best prices yet on popular tech products like video games, gaming peripherals, laptops, 4K TVs, phones, PC accessories, and more. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed Prime Day 2020 from July to October, but Prime Day 2021 is back on a somewhat normal schedule, happening on Monday, June 21st, and Tuesday, June 22nd.

If you’re shopping for Prime Day deals on Amazon, you’ll need to sign up for Amazon Prime, however, not all of the best Prime Day 2021 deals will live on Amazon. Many other retailers, including Walmart and Target, will also be running competing deals that we’ll tell you all about in our deals coverage.

You can count on us to publish only the best deals, but if you want to be among the first people to know about price drops on products you’re already interested in, you’ll want to get set up with a price-tracking site. We’ve included a few of our favorite examples below, pointing out how each can help you track deals in slightly different ways, with their own special features.

All of them are free to use, and once you’ve added products that you’re interested in, you can rest easy knowing that you don’t need to take any action until it comes time to make a purchase.

CamelCamelCamel is the best tracker for Amazon products

CamelCamelCamel tracks the price of every product sold on Amazon and can send you alerts when they reach the price that’s right for you. Once a product reaches the desired price you’ve set, or lower, you’ll get an email about it. CamelCamelCamel only works for products on Amazon, however, so you’ll need to use a different one below if you want to track price movement on Walmart, Best Buy, and other retailers.

To track prices and get alerts via email, you’ll need to create a free account. Also, I suggest installing the site’s browser extension, called The Camelizer, which lets you see pricing trends on a product-by-product basis and allows you to set your desired price without navigating away from Amazon. It’s fantastic and easy to use.

As soon as one of the products falls below the amount set on your price alert, you’ll instantly get an email. And if you already have a wishlist saved on Amazon, you can import it into CamelCamelCamel.

Like CamelCamelCamel, the Honey browser extension can track the prices of items that you’re interested in, and it will alert you when it finds a deal. However, unlike the price-tracking site above, Honey will also scour each site you visit for offer codes that can be applied to your checkout total to save you even more money.

Honey works with Amazon and many other retailers, and you can add items to your “Droplist,” which is basically just a wishlist. On Best Buy, for example, the option to add an item to your list pops up on the product’s image, and you can select the price watch duration as well as the percentage off you’re looking for.

Slickdeals aggregates some of the best deals around the internet, as discovered by its team and community of users. The site also allows you to create deal alerts based on keywords, but they work a little differently on Slickdeals than they do with the above sites.

You can type in a product name, like “Nintendo Switch” or a retailer’s name, and once it’s added to your list, you’ll be notified of a deal alert if it meets your criteria. You can set it to alert you to literally any deal relating to your keyword, or you can filter out deals so that you’ll be notified if, for example, the deal is popular enough to make it to Slickdeals’ front page or if it earned a high rating from the community.

As you might have guessed by the name, PC Part Picker helps you pick PC components that are compatible with each other, making the already daunting task of piecing together a DIY PC setup a little easier.

That by itself makes it a crucial tool, but it’s also an excellent price tracker, showing you a detailed graph that illustrates the current and prior movement in price for a particular component. It lets you build the PC of your dreams, and it can alert you via email to price drops from big retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg, B&H Photo, and more. That way, you can, say, choose to wait to buy everything until that processor or graphics card comes down to a lower price you know it has hit before.

Look outside of Amazon

Prime Day is an event that shows off Amazon’s huge retail presence, so naturally, other retail chains take notice. Because of this, you can sometimes find better deals at Best Buy, Target, Walmart, and Newegg, all of which have announced they’ll be offering a slew of deals during Prime Day.

If Amazon’s sale doesn’t have everything you want or if you just want to make sure you’re getting the best deal, shop around a bit. Once again, you’ll be able to find all of our deals coverage in and outside of Amazon here, including our roundup of the best anti-Prime Day deals.

Trust the experts

We’re a discerning bunch here at The Verge, so don’t fret if you’re going into Prime Day 2021 without any prep. We’ll be corralling the best deals on tech and keeping our coverage up to date with new Lightning sale items while eliminating old ones to avoid any disappointment. So mark Monday and Tuesday, June 21st and 22nd, on your calendar, sign up for Amazon Prime, bookmark our coverage, and maybe start putting aside a little spending cash.