Amazon Prime Day has been underway since 9 pm Monday, July 10, and so far, customers have mixed feelings about the offerings.
For its third annual Prime Day, Amazon (AMZN) promised to display thousands of deals over the course of 30 hours, and on that they delivered. The issue many shoppers have expressed through social media is their frustration with the selection. For some, the items on sale simply aren’t living up to the hype.
“I have never seen anything worth buying show up for sale. I’ve always considered it an Amazon trying to clear the garbage off their shelves,” said Reddit user RadBadTad.
On Twitter, users were just as confused with the deals.
Beyond the random selection, the question of validity has been a constant theme in social media posts. Amazon might label an item as 30% off, but many are questioning if that is actually true. To test this theory we dug into the price history of a few deals, and came to the conclusion that at least a few items weren’t as discounted as they originally appeared to be.
Case in point, this crockpot is on sale today for $31.99, with Amazon listing the starting price at $59.99. At first, this looks like a sweet 47% discount, but the price history tells a different story. According to CamelCamelCamel, a site that tracks prices on Amazon, the same crockpot was priced at $39.99 on July 7. By July 9, the crockpot was selling for $63.41. Amazon is known to change the prices on items several times throughout the day, but this rise right before Prime Day kind of makes it look like Amazon inflated the price before dropping it to make the deal look better.
Other shoppers observed the same pattern.
That said, for every crockpot there’s Greenworks lawnmower, which is available to Prime members for the rock bottom price of $225. According to CamelCamelCamel, the lowest price found for this item was $295 on May 28, making the Prime Day deal an actual win.