As part of its continuing efforts to sign up shoppers to its premium Prime subscription service, Amazon has announced Prime Day, a ‘one day shopping event’ that promises ‘more deals than Black Friday’. Happening across Amazon stores globally on Wednesday 15 July, the event allows new and existing members of Amazon Prime to shop for ‘thousands’ of lightning deals throughout the day, starting on Amazon.co.uk at midnight BST.

Membership of Prime currently costs £79 a year, but for the next eight days, ahead of Prime Day, newcomers can sign up for the discounted rate of £59 for their first year. For this to function as an incentive, of course, is to assume customers will spend enough on Prime Day to find their savings outweigh the annual cost of a Prime subscription.

Initially offering free (‘free’) one-day delivery to subscribers upon its launch, Prime has since expanded to encapsulate a number of other services: the Netflix-rivalling streaming service Amazon Instant Video is free (‘free’) to subscribers, as is unlimited free (‘free’) Cloud storage of photographs; Kindle First offers Kindle-owning subscribers a chance to read a selection of four new books per month for free (‘free’) in advance of their official publication date; whilst the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library lets them borrow one book a month from a choice of over 600,000 for free (‘free’).

Besides all those free (‘free’) perks, the service has also expanded its delivery choices to encompass trials of one-hour delivery to certain postcodes in London, at a cost of £6.99 (‘£6.99’) per delivery.