Amazon Prime Day Preview: Smart Device Pre-Sale
Amazon’s annual Prime Day sale is June 14 and 15 this year. The online retailer is offering its usual bonanza of deals on all kinds of products, but its own products always get specially featured. The kinds of products Amazon features for Prime Day can sometimes paint a picture of what Amazon sees as the next big trend.
This year, Prime has a host of smart home and mobile systems optimized for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, suggesting Amazon is eager to continue trying to grab as large a market share in the voice tech space as possible. In addition, smart home devices can deepen the Alexa value proposition for consumers by augmenting their smart speaker capabilities. Amazon’s chief rival today in both smart speakers and smart home is Google which has a full complement of products in each category. These factors of deeper value and fierce competition are driving smart home to the top of Amazon’s 2019 Prime Day discount strategies.
Priming the Pump
Even before Prime Day officially begins, Amazon is already offering some deals on its smart home products. The pre-Prime deals include:
- $25 off Fire TV Stick 4K bundle with Echo Dot (3rd Generation)
- $50 off Echo Show 5 with Ring Video Doorbell Pro
- $50 off Echo Sub Bundle with Echo Plus (2nd Gen)
- $50 off Echo (2nd Gen)
- $70 off Ring Alarm 5-piece kit with Echo Dot and Philips Hue 2-Bulb Kit
- $80 off Fire Edition Toshiba 50-inch 4K Ultra HD Smart LED TV HDR–
Counter-Offer
Amazon’s ability to push its own products at a very low price during Prime Day hasn’t gone unnoticed by its competitors in voice assistant and smart home technology. Google has taken steps to try and beat Amazon at its own game, partnering with Walmart to offer deep discounts on its own line of Google Assistant-enabled products.
Amazon’s own pre-Prime discounts may have been in response to Google dropping the cost of a Google Home to $69.Regardless of the reason, Google has debuted Google Week, with smart home devices on sale through July 16, right before Prime Day begins. Along with sales on the Google Home family, Google is discounting its smart thermostat by $60 and its security systems by up to $100.
Prime Time
As for what Amazon will actually put on sale during Prime Day, the answer is probably everything related to its smart device brands including Echo and Ring, and probably a wide range of Alexa-compatible devices. Depending on what your personal home setup looks like, it’s also a good chance to get other smart home elements like light bulbs and plugs at a considerably lower price than usual.
Based on some of the deals from last year, this will be a really good chance for people who haven’t purchased voice assistant technology to acquire some, and for those who already have some of the products to upgrade to the next generation. And, since further spreading the adoption of its Alexa platform is a major goal for Amazon, these discounts will make consumers happy while furthering the company’s voice and smart home strategies.
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