Dive Brief:

• Amazon is pumping up its July Prime Day sales event by teasing countdown deals and emphasizing its fast delivery speeds .

• The e-retail giant is slashing the price of the Segway MiniPro hoverboard by $200, and touting some of the biggest deals from its marketplace sellers, which sold more than 14 million items to Prime members last year, according to CNET.

• Amazon is also emphasizing its same-day one- and two-hour delivery services, saying that since Prime Day last year, its Prime Now service has added 33 new metropolitan areas in six countries to the service, according to an Amazon press release.

Dive Insight:

Amazon says that this year even more third-party sellers will be involved in its Prime Day event, and that they’ll be offering twice as many deals. Overall, Amazon will have some 100,000 deals across nearly all product categories.

It’s not clear whether that will mitigate or exacerbate complaints from last year that Amazon’s Prime Day is pretty much a big rummage sale, with “blockbuster” deals on run-of-the-mill items like socks and phone cords that in reality were a dollar or two off.

But with truly blockbuster discounts in the mix—like the $200 discount on the hoverboard—that are more akin to Black Friday deals, Amazon may be able to persuade people that its summertime Prime Day event really is something to celebrate, while demonstrating its huge assortment to newer Prime members, especially those on a trial.

“I see a lot of reports have come out saying that people haven’t got the deals they expected,” marketing expert Shmuli Goldberg told Retail Dive last year. “But look at the amount of deals on Prime Day, in every single category. This wasn’t just Black Friday, with deals at the high end — televisions, mobile phones. The deals were spread through the whole range. And I believe that the reason Prime Day was what it was is that once Amazon gets a customer in, they’re a customer for life.”