When you buy an Amazon gadget, be sure to take the time to read the reviews. Many of these products are not worth your money. Here are five examples:

  1. The Echo Dot is a voice-activated speaker that costs $30. The reviews say it is not worth the money. One review says, “The Echo Dot is terrible and does not work well.” Another review says, “The Echo Dot is terrible and does not work well.”
  2. The Fire TV Stick costs $60 and has a 4K resolution and a variety of streaming services available. However, one review says, “The Fire TV Stick doesn’t have any good features and it’s really expensive.” Another review says, “The Fire TV Stick is really great for streaming content but it’s really expensive.”
  3. The Kindle Voyage costs $100 and has a 6-inch screen with an A9 processor and 8GB of storage space. However, one review says, “The Kindle Voyage doesn’t have any good features and it’s really expensive.” Another review says, “The Kindle Voyage is amazing for reading books but it’s really expensive.”
  4. The Apple Watch costs $349 and has a variety of features such as heart rate monitoring, GPS tracking, water resistance, air quality monitoring, compass directions tracking and more. However, one review says that the Apple Watch isn’t worth the money because there are better options out there for less money. Another review says that the Apple Watch isn’t worth the money because there are better options out there for less money.

Telling you to wait is one thing, but how long? And which products are worth waiting for? To give you a sense of how often products go on sale, we analyzed sale data between October 5, 2021 and October 5, 2022. (As such, in the charts below, the “Sales” column represents how many sales a particular product had in that 1-year window.)

This particular span of time is useful to analyze because it includes sales prices from Black Friday and Christmas in 2021, as well as Prime Day 2022, along with the general off-season sales that come and go.

Echo Smart Speakers and Displays

Except for the premium options like the Echo Studio and the Echo Show 10 and Show 15 (the biggest and best of each respective product line), the Echo products are perpetually on sale. We mean perpetually. The Echo, Echo Dot, and the smaller Echo Show models were on sale more than a dozen times in our October-to-October window.

With that in mind, unless you’re shopping for the top-tier products and simply can’t wait for those once-a-year sales, it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to pay the full MSRP for any Echo product. The Echo 15, for example, only went on sale twice over the year and only hit the lowest price point during one of those sales.

On the other hand, there’s rarely more than a month’s wait between Echo sales. On top of that, of the 16 times it went on sale, five of those times were the lowest price, and over half of them were 25% off or better.

So if you’re looking to pick up an Echo and you have the bad luck of looking at a time when it’s at the full $99.99 MSRP, just wait it out and pick it up for 25-40% just around the corner.

Fire TV Sticks

Further, the sale prices dip deeply pretty frequently. The Fire TV stick might have only hit the lowest $20 price point three times in the last year, but it dropped to $25 nine times. At that point, you might as well consider twenty five bucks as the actual price.

Fire Tablets

If Fire tablets are known for anything, it’s for being cheap. Compared to similar tablets on the market, they’ve always been a bargain, but that doesn’t mean you pay full price.

If you can hold off, you’ll save around 30% on your Kindle of choice by catching a deep sale and usually at least 15% by catching a lesser sale.

But the other Fire models, including the HD 8, HD Plus, and the HD 10 Plus, go on sale frequently. The Fire HD 8, for example, dipped below $55 ten times over the year and hit the lowest price of $45 six times. Waiting will yield savings of up to 50% off MSRP.

Kindle Ebook Readers

Our advice to hold off or buy hinges on whether or not you already have a Kindle. If you have a Paperwhite that’s a few generations old and you want to make a major upgrade to the Oasis, absolutely wait it out. It only drops down into the $195-200 range a few times a year, but when it does, you’re saving $80-85. It’s probably not worth waiting for the deepest possible Fire Stick sale to save $5, but $85 is a different story.

On the other hand, if you don’t have a Kindle and really want one or your long-out-of-warranty Kindle just died, you might find it tough to wait it out for a sale and consider it worth picking up a new one immediately.

So whether you’re shopping for an Echo to control your smart home with voice commands, a new Wi-Fi router to help with the burden of all those smart home devices, or some cameras from Ring or Blink to keep an eye on everything, again, don’t pay full price.