Interested in a 75% discount on a 43-inch 4K Amazon Fire TV, or a 15% price cut on a Motorola razr+ foldable phone? Good luck.
Yes, these are two of the featured deals this year for Amazon Prime Day, taking place Tuesday and Wednesday this week. But not everyone will have access to these discounts.
For the first time this year, Amazon is trying an invite-only approach for some Prime Day deals, requiring customers to request invitations to purchase certain items during the annual sales event.
It’s a way to be more selective about who gets Prime Day deals, partially shifting away from the usual first-come, first-served approach that has defined the event since it started in 2015.
The strategy is new to Prime Day, but not to the company: Amazon uses a similar invite-only approach with some of its own hardware products after they’re first unveiled, for example.
For the invite-only Prime Day deals, Prime members who request an invitation via a product page, prior to the event, will first receive an email confirming that their request has been received. If invited to purchase the product, they will receive an email or mobile notification at some point during the event.
“If invited to participate in the deal, you will have until the end of Prime Day to purchase the product. You can also choose not to purchase the product,” Amazon explains on a customer support page.
Customers will also get an email letting them know if they’re not selected.
What are the criteria for selecting customers after they request invites? We asked Amazon for an explanation, but the company declined to provide any details in response to our inquiry, leaving the process a mystery.
The fine print in the email confirmation makes it clear that Amazon wants to avoid creating a secondary market for Prime Day deal invites, prohibiting resale or transfer of the invitation, the associated account, or any related rights.
“The right to purchase the product by invitation provided to the Amazon account can only be used by the owner of the account and no other third party can use the right,” the email says, adding that if it detects such activity, Amazon “may cancel, terminate, suspend or invalidate the subject invitation or the transaction that involved such purchases.”
Some invite-only Prime Day deals are listed in a special section of the Prime Day web page, including electronics, kitchen accessories, and health and beauty products. There are also numerous of roundups of invite-only deals on various sites, including this one by Tom’s Hardware.
More notes and links in advance of Prime Day:
- Walmart, Best Buy, Target and other retailers are offering their own Prime Day alternatives this year, as in the past.
- Prime Day doesn’t look like much of a deal for Amazon investors. Bloomberg News reports that the annual event hasn’t lifted Amazon’s stock in recent years.
- Amazon is extending its own Prime Day deals to its health care initiatives, offering a discount on annual OneMedical memberships ($144 vs. $199 normally). Amazon bought OneMedical for $3.9 billion in February.
- Prime Day deals will also extend this year to participating third-party sites in the Buy with Prime program, which lets Prime members buy items on non-Amazon sites just as they would on Amazon.com. Doug Herrington, the CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores, explains the strategy.
