The Amazon Spring Deal Days sale begins this week, with PC gaming deals abound
Everything you need to know about Amazon’s Spring sale
The Amazon Spring Sale is back, refreshed and renamed as Amazon Spring Deal Days. Maybe because there’s so many of them: this flowery festival of buying stuff begins on Wednesday March 20th and runs all the way through Monday March 25th. And I thought Prime Day was getting too long, sheesh.
On the upside, this should mean more chances topick up some quality PC gaming hardware on the cheap. Been putting off that new SSD or graphics card upgrade? Spring Deal Days is likely your best opportunity to exploit mass discounts until Summer.
Update: I've started tracking some early Amazon Spring sale deals, which already span pretty much the full variety of PC hardware and accessories. Stay tuned to this page, as I'll be updating it with the main event deals on the 20th.
Unlike Prime Day, or the equally awkwardly-named Prime Big Deal Days, Amazon’s Spring Deal Days sale doesn’t lock all the biggest savings behind Prime membership. Anyone can rock up and take advantage of the main sale, and although Prime account holders will get special access to limited-time flash deals across the event, they’ll be rare, and might not even cover PC gear.
Still, if you fancy seeing what these one-off deals have to offer, you could always sign up for the Prime free trial. This will grant you all the niceties of Prime membership, including both flash sale access and next-day delivery, and if you cancel the trial after Spring Deal Days is over, you won’t pay a penny in subscription fees.
As for the kind of kit you can expect to see on sale, Spring Deal Days should follow the usual Amazon event formula of cutting prices on a bit of everything: PC components, peripherals, SSDs and Steam Deck microSD cards, the lot. Not all of it will actually be worth buying, obviously, but we’ll be collecting and curating the best PC gaming deals to share here on RPS. Be sure to check back on the 20th, then, for an at-a-glance guide to our top deal picks.
In the meantime, here are some of the 2023 Spring Sale’s bestsellers:
Amazon Spring Deal Days FAQ
When does Amazon Spring Deal Days start and finish?
According to Team Jeff themselves, the event kicks off at 00:00am on March 20th and closes at 23:59pm on March 25th. The lack of timezones (as well as when previous Amazon sales events began and ended) suggests that these are applicable regardless of whatever your local time is.
That does mean it will technically start earlier in, say, the UK than it does in the US, but because different regions have their own stocks sale prices, you shouldn’t worry about getting gazumped by people on the other side of the world.
Do you need Prime membership for Spring Deal Days?
Again, not for the vast majority of discounts, which are available to anyone - whether or not they're a paid-up Prime member. It’s only a special selection of limited-time offers that are kept exclusive.
If you don’t have an active Prime subscription and want to get in on these limited deals as well, by all means, sign up for the free trial. It lasts for 30 days, which is more than enough to do your sale shopping, get the goods delivered quickly, then bail by cancelling the actual subscription.
How can I get the best deals?
If you just want to search for yourself, Amazon has no shortage of search filters, and you can opt into Deal Alerts that will notify you if there’s a sale price on items you’re interested in. Alternatively, you can create an Amazon wishlist of the PC hardware you want in advance, then once Spring Deal Days is underway, you can use it as a quick reference to see which of those products are going cheap.
However, relaying on Amazon alone would be affording it a level of trust that it perhaps doesn’t deserve. I’ve often come across multiple listings for a single product, where Amazon has been more heavily promoting the listing with a higher price. And, unfortunately, many Amazon sellers still use the old trick of dramatically raising a price in the days before a big sale, then dropping it back down to the original price once the sale is underway. Thus, it might have a big, enticing "discount" listed, but it’s not actually saving you any money.
My favourite tool for scuppering such trickery is the Keepa browser extension. This adds a chart to every individual Amazon listing that shows how its price has changed over time, so if a so-called sale price doesn’t tell the full story, you can check it here.
Or, as ever, you can just let RPS do the deals-scouring work for you. From the morning of the 20th, I’ll launch and maintain an all-in-one guide to the best PC gaming deals I can find, gathering up all the products that are both a) worth owning in their own right and b) are available with genuine, significant savings. I’ll also be highlighting the really, really good stuff with separate posts, so keep an eye on the Deals shelf on the RPS homepage for more updates as Spring Deal Days progresses.