In recent years, Amazon has begun hosting a short term promotional event called Prime Day in order to encourage more people to sign up to its subscription-based suite of services. This year Prime Day is set to kick off on the 10th of July at 6pm and runs for just over 24 hours, with timed deals and discounts available exclusively via safe shopping online.

Earlier this week there was even an opportunity for shoppers to save money on the cost of a Prime subscription itself, which was available for £59 rather than £79 annually.

There are various perks to having a Prime account, including free delivery on a variety of products when ordered from Amazon’s site, money saving reductions on other sites operated by Amazon and access to cloud storage. Prime Video, Amazon’s equivalent of Netflix, is also packaged with a subscription.

It seems likely that there will be a number of special discounts this year, with owners of the Alexa-enabled personal assistant hub, the Amazon Echo, able to find out what deals are available days before the rest of the buying public.

Of course, while Amazon is one of the UK’s biggest proponents of shopping online, it is not without its critics. And there are some who believe that Prime is just another facet of its attempts to monopolise the marketplace and drive out smaller rivals.

The good news is that the web provides consumers with all the tools they need to find the items they want to buy at the best possible price. So no matter how large Amazon grows, there will always be room for competitors to step in and undercut it, which is undoubtedly proven by the fact that Prime Day has been created in the first place.