Gone by Sunday: We Set Alerts on a Dozen Flash Sales to See Which Ones Actually Fired
Photo: Standard Editors, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Flash deals have a cruel sense of humour. You spot a Ninja air fryer at £79 instead of £149, go to put the kettle on, and by the time you're back it's 'claimed out'. We wanted to know whether it's possible to reliably catch these things — so we set up alerts on twelve products across Amazon, Argos, Currys and AO, then waited to see which tools told us first.
The Tools We Put Through Their Paces
For Amazon, camelcamelcamel remains the obvious starting point. You paste in a product URL, it tracks the price history, and you set a target price. It's free, slightly clunky, and UK-based tracking works well for most listings. Over our test period, it caught six of the eight genuine Amazon price drops we saw — though it emails you rather than pings your phone, which costs you precious minutes.
PriceSpy covers a wider spread of UK retailers, including Argos, and its price history graphs are genuinely useful for spotting a fake discount. Keepa is another Amazon-focused option that runs as a browser extension, showing the price history the moment a product page loads.
Were the Deals Real?
Here's where it got interesting. Of the twelve products we tracked, four of them had their 'was' prices quietly inflated a fortnight before the sale. One hoover that flashed at '40% off' had actually been sitting at the sale price for most of the previous month. The price history graphs exposed all of it.
Argos flash deals were the most honest in our sample — genuine drops, but brutal stock limits. Amazon's 'Deal of the Day' items were a mixed bag: some real, some merely returning to their long-run average price dressed up as a bargain.
A Sensible Routine
If you're after a specific item, set a camelcamelcamel alert at a price you've actually seen in the history, not a hopeful one. Check PriceSpy before buying anything 'discounted' at Argos or Currys. And if a deal matters to you, act within the hour — our test showed the average flash deal lasted under 48 hours, with the best stock gone in the first few.
The deals are out there. The trick isn't luck — it's letting a robot do the watching for you.
