Amazon Prime Day 2017 Date Announced

Amazon Prime Day is coming back. The online retailer announced Thursday that Prime Day 2017 is going down on Tuesday, July 11. That's right, it's official.

This year, the online retailer is giving shoppers plenty of time to prepare for the massive day of deals plus six extra hours of savings. The first major Amazon Prime Day deals will post at 9 p.m. Eastern time Monday, July 10, and the savings will run through 3 a.m. Eastern early Wednesday morning.

Like last year, Amazon will also post a variety of deals online every day leading up to the main event. Pre-Prime Day deals start Wednesday, July 5.

The 30-hour shopping event will feature more than 100,000 deals worldwide exclusively for Prime members. If you're not yet a member, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial and take advantage of all the savings at no extra cost. New deals will post as often as every five minutes. Patch DealTown subscribers will be updated down to the minute of all the latest savings.

Sign up for Patch deal alerts before Prime Day

Prime Day has become a boon for the company, which has posted some of its biggest sales days since starting the promotion two years ago. In its first year, Prime Day netted Amazon 34.4 million orders, which the company said was more than the previous year's Black Friday.

Amazon declined to give specific numbers for last year but said it blew 2015 out of the water, with a 60 percent increase in sales globally and 50 percent in the United States. With an extra few hours of deals this year, that number will likely increase yet again.

Here are a few other things you should know about Prime Day 2017:

Amazon Is Debuting Deals By Interest

Now you can quickly sort through Amazon's Prime Day deals based on what you really need, such as back-to- school, gaming, pet products and more.

There Are Going To Be More 'Tier 1' deals

That includes Amazon products such as Echo and Kindle, which sold like wildfire (and sold out quickly) for the company last year.

Voice Shopping Is Now A Thing

If you have an Alexa-enabled device such as Echo or Echo dot, you can start shopping Prime Day two hours earlier than everyone else at 7 p.m. on Monday night.

Not a Prime member? Sign up for a 30-day free trial

Want to win Prime Day 2017? Here's what to do before the big day:

When people make a purchase from DealTown, Patch may make a small commission in the process. Where's that money go? To help fund the local, community reporting that makes Patch great. So thank you in advance for supporting what we do.