Five tips on how to find the best deals in the Amazon Spring Sale (or any sale)
The spring sales have started but how do you know what’s a real deal and what’s too good to be true?
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Amazon’s Spring Sale 2025 deals event officially kicked off on 25 March. It’s one of four annual Amazon sales periods, preceding the summer and autumn Prime Days and Black Friday in November.
In the Spring Sale (or Spring Deal Days, as it is officially titled), the best deals tend to be on homewares, such as vacuum cleaners and air fryers, or tech, particularly on own-brand products such as Fire TVs, Kindles, Echo smart speakers and Fire Tablets.
Read our guide to the best deals in the Amazon Spring Sale to find out which products have been discounted.
However, it’s important not to get carried away. Not all discounts are as large as they appear and the best can be hard to find. As Recommended Reviews Editor, tasked with helping you make the right choices on your biggest purchases, I’ve been covering sales events like this since 2021.
I’ve picked up a few tricks over the years, all of which I’ll share below, along with some insight from the Telegraph’s consumer champion Katie Morley.
Tips to finding the best deals in the Amazon Spring Sale, at a glance:
Here are some quick links to my five best tips, if you’re in a rush.
- Make sure prices aren’t lower elsewhere
- Make sure prices are genuinely at their lowest
- Shop at smart times
- Use wish lists and price alerts
- Shop out of season
How to find the best deals in the spring sales
Here are those five simple tips explained in more detail, to make sure you’re shopping genuine deals in the spring sales this year.
1. Make sure prices aren’t lower elsewhere
“If I’m looking for a big ticket item, I’ll usually monitor the average price across all retailers, including both Amazon and the high street, before buying,” Telegraph consumer champion Katie Morley says, “I never trust that ‘sale’ prices are actually the cheapest.”
You can use various websites to compare prices at multiple retailers. Idealo compares prices, delivery costs and times and includes ratings so that you can judge sellers’ bona fides. Price Spy and Price Runner also allow you to see price history, which you’re highly advised to do (see below).
These comparison sites include second-hand models, which can be much cheaper, but should be weighed against how much you trust the seller. Telegraph Recommended staff have bought good-as-new refurbished tech at Amazon itself or at specialists such as Back Market, for lower prices than are seen in the Spring Sale on new items.
Category-specific sites such as Mattress Online, Air Con Centre and Mobiles.co.uk are also good places to look if you can’t find deals at Amazon.
“However, don’t forget to factor in the cost of postage and packaging when comparing prices, as expensive shipping fees sometimes can eat into perceived discounts,” Katie says. One Amazon Prime benefit is free next-day delivery.
2. Make sure prices are genuinely at their lowest
At Telegraph Recommended, we always calculate discounts against the average price, rather than the RRP (recommended retail price). Many products are never sold at their RRP and some only for brief periods of time to make a deal look more impressive.
When we look for the best deals on Amazon, we always check the price history. The graph above shows how the price of one television fluctuated over the last 12 months. Note that it was only sold at its full price for three extremely brief periods. It was at its lowest price for three slightly longer periods, corresponding to Prime Day, Black Friday and Christmas. The rest of the time it was somewhere in the middle. That’s the average price you should calculate discounts against.
The source for this graph is CamelCamelCamel, a third-party price tracking site that we use to check price histories. Keepa does largely the same thing and both are specific to Amazon. Price Spy and Price Runner, mentioned above, allow you to check price histories across multiple retailers.
Here are some examples, showing how Amazon’s claimed discounts make it hard to tell which deals are worth grabbing:
Apple iPhone 14 Pro
An example of a genuine deal
Amazon is selling this at a discount of 15 per cent against the RRP of £999.99. However, our price trackers show that the average price over the last year was £1053.59, which actually means you’re getting a discount of 19 per cent, which is rare for Apple.
The higher amount of storage you get with the phone, at 256GB, also makes it an appealing deal. We’ve reviewed the similar Apple iPhone 14 and 14 Plus in our guide to the best iPhones, in case you want more information on the range before making a decision.
Amazon is currently selling the Blueair Blue Max Auto air purifier at a claimed discount of 29% off the RRP at £99. While that sounds impressive, this isn’t a genuine deal and has previously been lower at Amazon. And if we look at how other retailers have priced the item on Idealo, we’ve seen this air purifier drop as low as £79. This might be one to keep an eye on if you’re in the market for a new air purifier but otherwise, we would recommend steering clear of this deal for now.
3. Shop at smart times
If an item you have your eye on is going to be discounted, it’s likely the discount will be applied at the stroke of midnight. In-demand products might have sold out by the time everyone else wakes up, so this can be a clever time to buy.
The early hours of the morning can also be a smart time to look for Lightning Deals. Prominently displayed on Amazon’s deals page, these are limited-time deals where Amazon and third-party sellers make a limited inventory available at a lower price for a set time.
Some Lightning Deals can be as short as a few hours. Often the inventory sells out well before the period ends. Discounts here can be substantial but don’t let haste prevent you from checking that the price is genuinely lower than usual and that it can’t be bought cheaper elsewhere.
4. Use wish lists and price alerts
“Retailers love to create events because it gives them an excuse to sell higher volumes of the items they are looking to sell,” Katie says. These may not necessarily be the items you’re looking to buy. Keep a cool head and focus on buying things you would have bought anyway, but at a better price.
One tip is to create a wish list. Log into your Amazon account. Select ‘Accounts and Lists’ from the top of the page. (On the Amazon app you’ll find it behind the ‘Me’ tab at the bottom of the screen.) Create a list.
When you see something you like on Amazon, you can select ‘Add to list’ instead of ‘Add to basket’. You can filter a list to show only the items with current deals. Checking it regularly could give you a head start on time-limited deals.
You can also enable Amazon deal notifications on your phone. Go to the ‘Me’ tab in the Amazon app and click the ‘Settings’ gearwheel to find the Notification settings. Within that, select ‘Deals And Recommendations’ and finally click ‘Savings’.
All the price-checking sites mentioned above allow you to set price alerts on products as well. You choose the price you’re prepared to pay and when it falls to that price or lower, you’ll receive an alert.
5. Shop out of season
“Reductions are most likely when customer demand for seasonal items is lowest and retailers need to shift physical stock to make way for new items,” Katie says. “For example, if you’re buying Christmas decorations in January, or summer clothes in autumn. If you can take a longer-term approach with your shopping and buy ahead, this is how you’ll snap up the best bargains.”
In the spring sales, look out for shopping deals on winter clothes, electric heaters and heated blankets to save a few pounds compared to buying on Black Friday.
Once the spring sales start, we’ll be identifying all the best deals and adding them to our top buyer’s guides. If you see an eye-catching deal promoted elsewhere but not at Telegraph Recommended, that’s a sign that our competitors aren’t working quite as hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.
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