Amazon is celebrating its 20th birthday this Wednesday, July 15th. The plan is to commemorate it with an explosion of deals the retailer claims will surpass those we typically see on Black Friday, the biggest shopping phenomenon in the USA. The special event is being referred to as Amazon Prime Day and it has the whole online shopping community going nuts; but there is one major caveat.

Amazon Prime Day is not for everyone. As its name entails, these seemingly spectacular offers will only be accessible to Amazon Prime subscribers. Those who want to take advantage of this exclusive sale will have to sign up for the $99/year service, which is a great deal if you consider it also grants access to free 2-day Prime shipping, Amazon Prime Instant Video streaming, access to Kindle books, unlimited Amazon Prime Photos cloud storage and more.

Signing up will still be a bit of a hassle for those who lack a Prime subscription, but there are some great ways to access Amazon Prime Day discounts without fully taking the plunge into the Amazon shopping ecosystem. The king of internet retailers does offer free trials to first-time users, and they plan to leverage these in order to possibly get more Prime customers in the future.

Want in on these great deals? You could test the service and enjoy them without paying a dime (at least until the trial period ends). Let’s show you how it’s done.

Start your 1-month Amazon Prime free trial

New users will have it easy once Amazon Prime day comes around. Everyone gets a 1-month free trial to Amazon Prime! All you have to do is head over to the Amazon Prime Free Trial page, click on “Start my free trial” and follow the on-screen instruction.

Sign up for Amazon Prime free 1-month trial

Users will be Prime members for a month and will be charged the subscription fee if they don’t cancel before the trial period is over. By the way, you can only sign up for this testing phase once. If you have used up your Amazon Prime free trial in the past, you will need to fork out the $99 this time around.

Are you a student?

If you are a student, you are in for a real nice treat. Amazon gives active students a 6-month free trial to Amazon Prime. To top it off, they also get a 50% discount after the trial period is over. You will need an .edu email address, but you should have no trouble obtaining one if you are part of any college or university.

Sign up for Amazon Prime free 6-month trial

Time to shop!

One of the main attractions at any shopping event is obviously the electronics deals. We are sure there will be plenty of Android and mobile-related goodies to buy at a discount, so be certain we will be all over these deals once we learn more details.

Make sure you are ready to get your free trial if you can, as July 15th is only a couple days away. If you no longer can, it will mean you have tested this service in the past and probably know how awesome Amazon Prime really is. It’s worth the $99 if you shop and use Amazon’s services constantly.