Amazon Prime Day: how to sign up for free and avoid paying out

You’ll need to be a member of Prime to take part in the day of sales — but you don’t need to pay out the £79 a year that usually entails

Empty boxes are stacked in the packaging department at the Fulfilment Centre for online retail giant Amazon in Peterborough (Getty Images)

Amazon is about to launch Prime Day, offering a day of offers on July 15. Customers have to be a member of Amazon’s premium Prime service to take part — but thankfully that isn’t as complicated or as expensive as it might sound.

Amazon is advertising its free trial as part of the promotion for the day, though the offer is actually the same as any other time. The company will give you a month’s free trial, before switching over to the £79-per-year auto-renewing subscription when that’s over.

If you’re a student (or you know somebody who is) you can take advantage of Amazon’s student offer. That gives people most services in Amazon Prime free for the first six months, and then gives them 50 per cent off after that.

It’s important to remember to cancel the subscription, if you don’t want it anymore. It might be worth setting a reminder using your phone, or writing it in your calendar, to make sure that you don’t forget — if you do, and end up getting charged, Amazon might not refund you.

If you do keep it up, you get one-day delivery free — and access to Amazon’s one- and two-hour delivery services — as well as the streaming TV and film service, cloud storage and the Kindle lending library, which lets people read select books for free.