How to shop like a pro during Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Despite Amazon and other retailers filling the summer and fall months with more sales than ever before, Black Friday and Cyber Monday remain the biggest shopping days of the year. And, in recent years, the sale periods have started earlier, giving you more time to take advantage of the deals.
We’re already hard at work to find the best prices on phones, accessories, 4K TVs, noise-canceling headphones, gaming gear, and other tech throughout the deal-packed weeks culminating in the big events, whether you plan to shop in person or online.
You can always count on us to publish only the best deals that you need to know about, no matter the season. However, if you want to be among the first people to spot price drops on the products you’re interested in, you’ll want to get a head start on your Black Friday and Cyber Monday game plan. Thankfully, we have a few suggestions for scouting early sales at your favorite retailers, finding the right price-tracking tool, and setting up email alerts to ensure you don’t miss rare discounts at Amazon and elsewhere.
Leverage a price-tracking tool or deal aggregator
The most effective way to find a truly great deal is to set up a price-tracking tool. We’ve included a few of our favorites below, many of which we use daily here at The Verge. Each can help you track deals at various retailers — including Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, and Target — but they each do so differently and come with their own set of advantages / disadvantages.
All of them are free to use, and once you’ve added the products you’re interested in keeping an eye on, you can rest easy knowing that you don’t need to take any action until it comes time to make a purchase. Just make sure you keep your email notifications on so you see the alerts as they come in.
CamelCamelCamel
CamelCamelCamel is arguably the most popular price-tracking tool at The Verge, and for good reason: it’s incredibly useful since it tracks the price of every product sold on Amazon and can send you alerts when an item falls to a customizable price threshold. Once a product reaches the desired price you’ve set (or lower), you’ll get an email about it. You can use the extension’s price graph to determine what price is likely to happen based on historical data, but it’s always a shot in the dark.
To track prices and get alerts via email, you’ll need to create a free CamelCamelCamel account. Additionally, we suggest installing the site’s browser extension, The Camelizer, which works with Google Chrome, Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Microsoft Edge. The handy tool lets you view pricing trends on a product-by-product basis and set your desired price without leaving Amazon. It’s fantastic, easy to use, and works in several countries, including the US, UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, and Australia.
As mentioned, the tracker only works for products listed on Amazon. However, in May, the company released CamelMart, its price tracker for Walmart. While it doesn’t have a browser extension (yet), its functionality is similar to CamelCamelCamel in that you can set price alerts and email notifications, so you’ll always know when your desired price threshold for a particular product is met.
Keepa
Like CamelCamelCamel, Keepa is another handy tool for tracking product prices on Amazon. Keepa has charts that track pricing trends and can alert you when it finds a deal. Similarly, you can also import any of your Amazon wishlists.
Unlike CamelCamelCamel, however, you don’t necessarily need to create an account to track prices with Keepa; just install the appropriate browser extension for Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, or Opera, and Keepa will automatically add a price history graph to supported product listings. The embedded graph shows pricing history and allows you to specify various pricing details. If you set a desired price, Keepa will send you a price alert via email, push notification, Telegram, or RSS.
Slickdeals
Slickdeals aggregates some of the best deals around the internet, as discovered by its team and community of users. Its site also lets you browse coupons and create deal alerts based on specific keywords, though the latter works a little differently on Slickdeals than it does with the sites above.
You can type in a product name, like “Nintendo Switch 2,” “OLED TVs,” or a retailer’s name, and once it’s added to your list, you’ll get a deal alert if it meets your criteria. You can set it to alert you to literally any deal related to your keyword, or you can filter out deals so you’ll only be notified if, for example, the deal is popular enough to make it to Slickdeals’ front page or earns a high rating from the community. If you like browsing deals, it’s generally a good idea to visit Slickdeals frequently, especially since it usually has a Black Friday component that allows you to browse circulars for Best Buy, Target, and other retailers in advance.
Also, it’s just fun to see what the community digs up.
Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome
For a more hands-off way to see whether you’re getting a good deal, try your browser’s built-in tools. For a few years now, Edge has been able to tell you when you’re looking at the best price for a particular product from a range of retailers, and Google Chrome can track price fluctuations and notify you when a particular product goes on sale. Edge and Chrome are available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, as well as Android and iOS.
Use Alexa for Shopping, Amazon’s capable AI chatbot
You may have already noticed that sometimes, when you’re shopping on Amazon, a sidebar opens to reveal more information about the product you’re looking at. Even if you haven’t used it, you can’t miss it; it’s prominently featured in Amazon’s upper nav bar and accessible by clicking the Price History button on a given listing.
Whether you’re using the Amazon app or the website, it’s a capable tool that, at its core, does some of the same tasks as our other recommendations. It can send price alerts and show up to a year’s worth of pricing data, helping you make informed buying decisions for products on Amazon. It can also recommend alternatives that might be a better value and, if you’ll allow it, can even automatically purchase products on your behalf.
It can do a lot more, too. For instance, you can have it update you when, say, a specific product launches, and it can shop on your behalf by adding specified items to your cart at a specified frequency. You can also use it to compare products sold on Amazon, and even upload photos of wishlists to find matching products.
Set up deal alerts for Alexa or the Amazon app
If you have an Alexa-compatible smart gadget, such as an older <a href="https://www.theverge.co
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