Today in the UK, the Amazon Spring Deal Days sale got underway, meaning hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of items are discounted.
Many of those aren't very interesting, especially to cyclists, but among the sea of savings, there are often a few real gems, and after a while searching, I've managed to pluck out a handful that cyclists can get excited about.
To take advantage of the Amazon deals, you'll need to be signed up for Amazon Prime. Amazon offers a free trial period for new users, but you can cancel your trial before the first payment is taken.
Amazon Spring Deal Days UK: Top picks
Amazon Spring Deal Days: Are the deals any good?
The Spring Deal Days are running for an entire week, meaning there should be plenty of time to find what you're looking for at a discounted price. It's safe to say we'll be keeping an eye on the sales for the duration to see if things change.
Most of the deals we've seen aren't 'best-ever' prices, but they're close enough that we still think you should see them, in case you're in the market for a replacement already.
How we find the best cycling deals
There are several Amazon sale events each year that we cover, but we don't use AI, robots, monkeys with typewriters, nor Santa's elves to compile this content, it's all done by members of the Cyclingnews tech team.
This year, that includes Josh Croxton, Will Jones, Tom Wieckowski, Paul Brett and Graham Cottingham. Each of whom has years of experience writing tech-related bike content for websites and magazines.
Put simply, we trawl the sales looking for products that feature in our buying guides, then if we find a good price, we cross-check it against the rest of the internet.
We use tools to help us. Primarily, we use the strangely-titled but eminently useful CamelCamelCamel tool to check historical pricing. We also use The Wayback Machine to check former listings where necessary.
More pertinently, though, we use our years of experience testing cycling products (bikes, clothing, accessories, tech and so on) to give us a good understanding of what products are good, and which are bad, because no matter how cheap or heavily discounted something is, it's not a 'good deal' if the product is worthless.
We then combine that insight with our knowledge of the industry. We know which brands are popular, and which are not. We sometimes know which are overstocked (and likely to want to discount heavily). We also know if a brand just launched - or might be set to launch - a new model, and thus might want to clear out the older model to make room for the new one.
More than anything, we simply use our understanding of which products are available on the market in each category, what they're priced at, and which of them are the best. If product A is marginally better than product B, but product B becomes significantly cheaper in sales, we make a human judgment on which to recommend. If we still think product A is worth the extra spend, then we'll say that, and likewise Vice Versa. Sometimes we might simply give you the facts and let you make that judgment because only you can truly decide what the best product is for your needs and your budget.
If we find a product that meets the criteria of good, a good price, and is not available cheaper elsewhere, then it gets added. If it is available cheaper elsewhere, we might still include it if it's a good offer, but we'll always share the better price too.
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