My top Amazon Spring Sale tips to help you secure the best deals

One of the biggest bargain bonanzas is in full swing with the return of the Amazon Spring Sale. Taking place between now and 31 March, the online giant has slashed up to 45 per cent on thousands of products, from home appliances, air fryers and beauty to top tech, including laptops and Apple gear.

I’ve been covering both Black Friday and Amazon Prime Day for almost a decade, so I know the tips and tricks for making the best of all of Amazon’s sales. I also know the pitfalls of Amazon’s discounts and know exactly how you can really sniff out the best savings to become champions at shopping in any large-scale online sale event.

To help you navigate the Amazon Spring Sale offers, I’ve put together a handy list of my top tips so you can ensure you’re getting the very best deal and aren’t left paying more than you should. From comparing prices on rival sites to the fake discounts you should ignore, here are my top pointers for Amazon’s October Prime Day.

Unlike Amazon Prime Day, you don’t actually need a Prime membership to get any of the deals in the Spring Sale. But the real perk of the Prime subscription is that you’ll get free same-day or next-day delivery. If you don’t have Prime, it’ll cost you £2.99 for standard delivery or £5.99 for one-day delivery.

Amazon Prime costs £8.99 per year or £95 per month. If you’re not already a Prime member, you might be eligible for a free 30-day trial of Prime. It’s only available to Amazon customers who have never been a Prime member before or haven’t been a Prime member in the last 12 months.

If you’re between the ages of 18 and 22, you can also get an even longer six-month free trial, as well as half-price memberships, meaning you’ll pay just £4.49 instead of £8.99 per month. 

It’s easy to go feral during the Amazon Spring Sale, buying everything you probably don’t need because it has a nice red label. But remember, a deal isn’t a deal if you don’t actually need it. The nice thing about the Amazon Spring Sale is that it lasts six full days, so you have time. I recommend making a wish list of the things you’ve been eyeing up over the years but have struggled to afford. Use historical sites to check how much it cost before the Amazon Spring Sale started to see whether it’s a good discount or not.

I’ve been waiting to buy a new dehumidifier to help dry my clothes, for example, and really want a new Kindle. If I see that it’s gone down in price by an amount I’m happy with, I’ll buy it.    

Amazon can be a little sneaky sometimes by adjusting the RRP of its products. It reportedly changes the prices on its website 2.5 million times per day, so you can never really be sure if the original price is the price that the manufacturer is charging. I recommend doing a quick Google search to see how much it costs at other retailers.

For example, if I’m looking for a new iPad, and it’s currently on sale at Amazon, I’ll check Apple’s website for the original price, just so I know that the apparent discount is legit. If it is, I’ll head to other retailers such as Argos, John Lewis & Partners, Currys and AO.com to make sure it isn’t the same price (or cheaper) there. If it is, I might consider shopping at the other retailer if it offers better perks, such as a longer warranty or a better trade-in deal.

Amazon is notorious for increasing the RRP of leading electric toothbrushes to exorbitant prices, then discounting them by upwards of half price. Watch out for these – the discount isn’t usually as good as it sounds.

Some of the more expensive brushes bounce up and down in price, spending exactly two weeks at full price, then two weeks at half price – rinse and repeat. Again, check other retailers for the actual price of the electric toothbrush and make a call. You’ll still find good savings on Oral-B and others, they just won’t be as big as Amazon might have you think.   

It’s sometimes difficult to know if a deal is actually one exclusive to the sale. Maybe that TV or laptop you’ve been considering had been discounted to that price weeks before the Amazon Spring Sale even started. Maybe you still want to buy it, maybe you don’t, but it’s still nice knowing if something is actually a discount exclusive to the Amazon Spring Sale or not.

Use Amazon price history tools such as CamelCamelCamel, which can illustrate how prices on Amazon can change. These tools give you historical data on a product’s lowest and highest prices, giving you an idea of whether it’s something you should pick up now or leave until it goes down even further.

There are a host of no-name brands on Amazon that churn out poorly-made products, such as laptops, just so the manufacturer can make a quick buck during Prime Day or the Spring Sale. It will usually have a steep discount slapped onto its price, but the machine will most likely have really bad specifications.

Less tech-savvy individuals could get caught out by this because of how difficult it can be to decode the technical jargon of a laptop. The IndyBest team will only focus on solid laptops that we’ve tested from well-respected brands in our guide to the best laptop deals, so try not to get caught out. This applies to every product category on Amazon, but particularly so for laptops.

The IndyBest team aren’t just curating guides of the best Amazon Spring Sale deals, but we’ll also be running a nifty rolling liveblog until 31 March. The liveblog is captained by a team of IndyBest deal experts, who will be busy rifling through a torrent of discounts on offer to bring you the Amazon Spring Deal Days deals worth caring about.

You’ll also find more shopping tips on the liveblog, and even more coverage across our entire directory of Amazon Spring Sale shopping guides. 

From coffee machine deals to mattress offers, we’re rounding up all the best Amazon Spring Sale deals