PREVIEW: The Truth About Amazon, Channel 4

The Truth About Amazon is the ultimate guide to how Amazon dominates our shopping and everything we need to know when using the site.

Amazon is one of the biggest winners of the pandemic. The online giant's revenue and profits have soared by almost 40% year on year, reporting its biggest ever quarterly profits of £5 billion, with sales of £70 billion in the last three months alone. With much of the high street closed for the second lockdown during the run-up to Christmas, Amazon has recruited an extra 400,000 staff to keep up with the coronavirus-driven demand.

Following on from Channel 4's previous investigations into Amazon, this three-part series presented by Helen Skelton and Sabrina Grant asks: How do we shop smart on Amazon? How did Amazon beat the rest and upend the high street? And should we trust Amazon this Christmas? With insight from executives, tech analysts and experts, Sabrina and Helen show how to get hidden bargains, while exposing the questionable practices we all need to know about. In this episode, Sabrina and Helen offer key tips to get the best deals possible.

They reveal how thousands of positive reviews have been hijacked and attached to completely different products; how Amazon pushes us into buying products offering poor value for money; and how you can find identical products for a much cheaper price on the same site. They reveal that buying secondhand on Amazon can be significantly more expensive than buying brand new. And they explore what happens when we let Amazon's personal assistant Alexa do our shopping.

The Truth About Amazon begins Tuesday 24th November at 9:15pm on Channel 4.