Amazon Prime Day 2023: what to expect and how to get the best PC gaming deals

Amazon Prime Day 2023 has a date, or indeed, two: Amazon's annual "sod it, discounts everywhere" sale will run across July 11th and 12th. That's a solid Tuesday and Wednesday to nab a deal on some new PC kit, almost definitely including some familiar faces from our best hardware guides.

While Amazon themselves have started running other sales events, like the recent-ish Amazon Spring Sale, Prime Day remains the most wide-ranging, deep-cutting festival of PC gear discounts outside of Black Friday itself. Expect all kinds of component, peripheral, gaming monitor, and laptop deals – so many that they hopefully won’t even be limited to Amazon alone. Some rival retailers like to spend Prime Day cutting their own prices to compete, so in addition to the best Prime Day deals guide I’ll inevitably put together, look out for another anti-Prime Day guide comprised of the best non-Amazon bargains.

In the meantime, here’s your guide to Prime Day 2023, including everything we know so far and some tips to avoid getting ripped off.

What is Prime Day?

Prime Day is Amazon’s biggest sale event for Amazon Prime members. Once a slightly sad display of discounted bric-a-brac, the kind of junk you’d suspect was just taking up space in Amazon’s warehouses, Prime Day has since become a genuinely significant day in the PC hardware enthusiast’s calendar. It now tends to encompass thousands of offers on gaming mice and keyboards, internal components like SSDs and graphics cards, and more than a few Steam Deck-ready microSD cards.

Also, I use "day" very loosely, because that's what Amazon do. In recent years, Prime Day has in fact lasted for 48 hours, complete with single-day-only deals and flash sales. In many cases, top quality hardware can reach its lowest-ever price over the course of those 48 hours, so hopefully history will repeat with this year's two-day event.

Do I need to be a Prime member to get Prime Day deals?

For the best ones, yeah. Amazon prices are usually elastic enough that non-Prime members would surely find some discounted wares during Prime Day 2023, but these won’t be Prime Day deals per se – and the products that do have true, Prime-members-only savings will invariably enjoy bigger reductions.

There’s no way around this membership requirement, except maybe burglarising an Amazon sorting centre, and ReedPop’s lawyers would like me to make it clear that we don’t endorse that. However, if you just want access to Prime Day discounts without the commitment of a rolling membership, what you can do is sign up for Prime’s free trial (UK / US). This grants you all the benefits of full Prime membership and lasts 30 days, so as long as you don’t sign up too far in advance, you can just use the trial to do some Prime Day shopping and then cancel the subscription before those 30 days are up. Cunning!

If, though, you decide to stick with Prime membership, it costs £9 / $15 per month or £95 / $139 annually.

When is Prime Day this year?

As I'd been hearing on the tech hack grapevine since June, Amazon have confirmed that Prime Day 2023 will run from Tuesday the 11th to Wednesday the 12th of July.

That's no surprise: outside of the pandemic-disrupted 2020 and 2021 renditions, every Prime Day since the first 2015 event has landed in the middle of July. They’ve also always began on either a Monday or a Tuesday, just like this year's Prime Day. Which should really just be called Prime Days at this point, but hey ho.

Any Prime Day tips to share?

Several! The first and most nakedly self-serving is to watch out for, and use, our Prime Day deals guides and recommendations. Unlike some sites, we only highlight offers on hardware we honestly believe is good; saving money is one thing but you shouldn’t buy tat just because it’s cheap. Especially when Prime Day, in its more recent form, is usually brimming with great stuff at significantly lowered prices.

If you’d prefer to do your own browsing, you can still protect yourself against dodgy deals. Sadly, yes, some Amazon vendors can fiddle the numbers to make it seem like Prime Day has brought prices crashing down – when in reality, they were recently and quietly raised, specifically so that the sale price could list a fatter discount.

Once again, then, I am recommending that you install the Keepa extension for your preferred browser. This adds a price-tracking graph to every Amazon listing, showing how the cost has fluctuated over time. This will let you catch when a deal is not what it seems, and vice-versa, when it’s the genuine article. Here, for example, is the Keepa graph for a Crucial P3 Plus SSD, which confirms that its current sale price really is an all time low.

Another trick, one that might save you some time on Prime Day, is to decide what you want to buy and add it to your cart in advance. Then, when you log in during Prime Day proper, you just need to hop back into the cart to see if your desired goods have had price cuts. Any that haven’t, you can just delete, before instantly heading to checkout. For goods that are liable to selling out quickly, like graphics cards, this could save you some disappointment.

Above all else, though, my advice is to only buy what you absolutely, definitely want (or need). I know there’s a certain thrill to piling your cart high with PC hardware but if you’re only purchasing something because it’s cheaper than it was last week, even if you weren’t previously thinking of getting it, then you’re ultimately not going to be saving money at all. Which, this being a sale, is rather the point.

What if I don’t like Amazon?

Many don’t. This year, we’ll be bringing back our anti-Prime Day deals guide, highlighting the best of the rest from UK and US retailers that have nothing to do with Amazon and Prime Day (outside of them running sales at the same time as the latter. A coincidence, I’m sure).

I can’t guarantee that their prices will be lower than the equivalent Amazon deal, if there is one, but sometimes they can be. And if last year was any indication, these non-Amazon sales will cover a competitively wide variety of savings on peripherals and components that we’d happily recommend.