Amazon has announced a new global shopping day, “Prime Day” to take place on Wednesday 15 July.
The company is hoping to beat the Black Friday sales and is promising more deals on Prime Day.
But the offer only is for members of its Amazon Prime service, which costs £79 annually. People can join up to midnight on Tuesday 14 July to participate and also get a £20 discount on the membership fee.
“We’re offering Prime members thousands of deals on Prime Day. In fact, in the UK we are offering more than double the number of deals that we offered last Black Friday,” said Christopher North, managing director at Amazon UK.
Prime Day will offer numerous ‘lightning deals’ for such products as electronics, toys, video games, clothes and beauty items, with fresh offers every 10 minutes.
The retailer said boasted of its “10 million eligible items for one-day delivery (in the UK) and added unlimited streaming movies and TV episodes, unlimited cloud photo storage, and access to 800,000 Kindle books.
The renewed drive to get people to sign up to Prime comes on the eve of Amazon’s 20th birthday.
The idea of Prime Day was lifted from the American shopping day of Black Friday, the day immediately after Thanksgiving when bargains are suddenly available in advance of Christmas. The introduction of Black Friday itself was a sharp interruption to an otherwise non-commercial long weekend devoted specifically to family and friends.
Amazon began offering Black Friday discounts in the UK in 2011 and was followed by other retailers.
