Amazon announces official Prime Day 2021 dates

By Noah McGraw Published June 29, 2021

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Today Amazon announced that Prime Day 2021 will be June 21 and 22. The event is set to be the biggest Amazon sales event of the year, with hundreds of Prime Day deals expected.

Prime Day is Amazon’s exclusive shopping holiday. The event rivals Black Friday and Cyber Monday in terms of potential savings. The event gets bigger and bigger every year, so we have high expectations for 2021.

Historically, the shopping event has been in July since its debut in 2015. Amazon did not announce a reason for pulling the date back to June this year. Last year, Amazon pushed Prime Day back to October due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though the shopping event was only one month before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the internet-wide shopping events, Amazon broke their own Prime Day sales records. They did not announce their total sales during the event, except to say that consumers saved a total of $1.4 billion.

The Echo Dot was the most popular item purchased last year. Amazon had just released the 4th generation Dot that same month. Amazon devices are historically popular during Prime Day events, for obvious reasons, so expect Prime Day Echo deals, Prime Day Fire TV deals, and Prime Day Kindle deals, just to name a few.

Other retailers are expected to announced their own sales for the same day to rival Amazon. Last year Best Buy and Walmart both had sales that overlapped with Prime Day.

Don’t forget to buy a present for your dad! Father’s Day is June 20 this year, one day before Prime Day. Unfortunately that means no steep discounts on gifts, if you want dad to unwrap it on the day of. Our Father’s Day Gift Guide should give you some options.

Section Editor, Commerce

Noah is Digital Trend's Commerce Section Editor. His focus is on deals writing, and he has four years of experience searching…

Topics

News

Ouch! Some Amazon Prime members face a 43% price hike

Some Amazon Prime customers in Europe are about to see the cost of their subscription rise by 43%.

According to Reuters, Amazon Prime members in the U.K., for example, have been told the annual fee will increase from 79 British pounds to £95, marking a 20% hike, while the monthly fee will rise from £7.99 to £8.99. Customers in Germany will see a 30% rise in the Prime fee to 89.90 euros, marking a 30% increase on the current annual fee, while Prime members in France face a 43% hike that will push their annual fee of 49 euros to 69.90 euros. Customers in Italy and Spain are also facing similarly steep increases.

Deals

The best OnePlus phone deal on Prime Day isn’t the 10 Pro

The OnePlus 10 Pro and OnePlus 9 Pro's camera modules.

The OnePlus 10 Pro is on offer as part of Amazon’s Prime Day 2022, but we’re not going to suggest you buy it, because if you dig around a little more, there’s a better offer on a different OnePlus phone. The OnePlus 9 Pro may be a phone from 2021, but at $699, it’s yours for a very good price, and you get the top version the company made.

OnePlus has reduced the OnePlus 10 Pro to $799 for Prime Day, but for this you get the 8GB/128GB model and not the top -- and recently released -- 12GB/256GB version. For that, you’ll have to pay $969. The $699 OnePlus 9 Pro has 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage space, but we're not recommending it because of the RAM. It’s the additional storage that’s important here. Neither OnePlus phone has a MicroSD card slot, so you’ve only got the internal storage to rely on. It's a good plan to get as much as possible.

News

Why you should opt for slow shipping this Prime Day

Amazon worker packaging products.

It's hard to not get sucked into the capitalist vortex on Prime Day. Just look at those deals and try to keep your credit card in your wallet. But if you can't resist the urge to buy something, you should at least consider opting for slower shipping. it might sound silly, since Amazon offers free two-day shipping for Prime members, and foregoing this perk could seem like a waste of your monthly subscription fee. But hear me out -- just because you can get your items delivered in two days doesn't necessarily mean you should. Here are a few good reasons to consider opting for slower delivery:

The first and perhaps most urgent reason is the environmental benefits. Transportation remains America's top source of emissions, clocking in at 27%. Roughly a quarter of that comes from freight trucks like those used by Amazon, and 8% from planes. In the air, Amazon makes about 160 flights a day with its fleet. Once those flights have made their deliveries, Amazon's trucks will often take smaller, less efficient loads in order to meet two-day delivery times. After all, trucks can't wait around for more shipments to come in so they can make more stops.