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How to find the best deals during Black Friday and Cyber Monday

How to find the best deals during Black Friday and Cyber Monday

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The annual deal extravaganza can be overwhelming, but with the right price-tracking tool and a little patience, it’s not hard to score big this holiday season.

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Photo showing Motorola Razr Plus and Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 on a tabletop showing cover display home screens.
With the right price tracker, you’ll know exactly when the latest flip phones from Samsung and Motorola go on sale.
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Even though Amazon just recently wrapped its fall Prime Day event, Black Friday and Cyber Monday remain the biggest shopping days of the year. Thankfully, like in previous years, we’ll be working to highlight the best prices on tablets, phones, TVs, gaming gear, and other tech throughout the deals-packed week, whether you plan to shop in person or online.

You can always count on us to publish the best deals that you need to know about; however, if you want to be among the first people to discover price drops on the products you’re interested in, you’ll want to get set up with a price-tracking tool. We’ve included a few of our favorite examples below, pointing out how each can help you track deals in slightly different ways, each with its own special features.

All of them are free to use, and once you’ve added products you’re interested in keeping an eye on, you can rest easy knowing that you don’t need to take any extra action until it comes time to make a purchase. Just make sure you keep email notifications on so you see the updates as they come in.

CamelCamelCamel

CamelCamelCamel tracks the price of every product sold on Amazon and can send you alerts when an item falls to a certain 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, but it’s always a shot in the dark. This price tracker also only works for products on Amazon, so you’ll need to use one of the trackers featured below if you want to track price fluctuations at Walmart, Best Buy, and other retail sites.

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 currently works with Google Chrome, Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Microsoft Edge. The handy tool lets you see pricing trends on a product-by-product basis and allows you to set your desired price without having to navigate away from Amazon. It’s fantastic, easy to use, and works in a number of countries, including the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, and Australia.

As soon as a product falls below the amount set on your price alert, you’ll instantly get an email. And if you already have a wishlist saved on Amazon, you can easily import it into CamelCamelCamel.

Keepa

Like CamelCamelCamel, Keepa is another handy tool for tracking the prices of products on Amazon. Keepa has charts that track pricing trends and can alert you when it finds a deal. 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 extension, and Keepa will automatically add a price history graph to supported product listings. The embedded graph showcases 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.

PayPal Honey

Like CamelCamelCamel, the PayPal Honey (formerly just “Honey”) browser extension can track the prices of items that you’re interested in, and it will alert you when it finds a deal. However, unlike the price-tracking site above, Honey will also scour each site you visit for offer codes that can be applied to your checkout total to save you even more money. Look for the orange Honey icon that will appear on the right side of your browser window when you land on a product page (you can move its location as you see fit, but that’s where it appears by default). If you click that icon, you can view coupon opportunities, take a closer look at historical pricing info, and compare pricing across a variety of retailers.

Honey works with Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and a number of other prominent retailers, and you can add items to your “Droplist,” which is a wishlist-meets-price watch list. The convenient Honey add-on also offers a “Smart Droplist” feature, which automatically adds frequently viewed items to your Droplist. Just don’t be surprised when you get the occasional automated email about an odd item. And if some of the alerts are for too-good-to-be-true prices on Amazon that are gone by the time you click on them, it’s likely the work of some crafty third-party sellers that hijacked the main listing for a short while. But don’t let it discourage you too much.

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Slickdeals

Slickdeals aggregates some of the best deals around the internet, as discovered by its team and community of users. Its site also allows you to browse coupons and create deal alerts based on specific keywords, though the latter work a little differently on Slickdeals than they do with the above sites.

You can type in a product name, like “Nintendo Switch OLED,” “Sonos,” or a retailer’s name, and once it’s added to your list, you’ll be notified of a deal alert if it meets your criteria. You can set it to alert you to literally any deal relating to your keyword, or you can filter out deals so that you’ll be notified if, for example, the deal is popular enough to make it to Slickdeals’ front page or if it earned a high rating from the community. If you like browsing deals, it’s generally good advice 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.

Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome

For a more hands-off approach to seeing if you’re getting a good deal, use your browser. For a few years now, Microsoft 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 both available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, as well as Android and iOS.

Trust the experts

We’re a discerning bunch here at The Verge, so don’t fret if you’re going into Black Friday / Cyber Monday without any prep. We’ll be corralling the best deals on tech and keeping our coverage up to date with new sale items while eliminating old ones to avoid any disappointment. While we usually suggest paying attention to deals starting the day after Thanksgiving — or November 24th, in this case — the truth is that several retailers (read: Best Buy and Amazon) are already poised to jump the gun and start offering some great deals in the lead-up to the shopping holiday. So, bookmark our coverage, follow us on X (formerly Twitter), subscribe to our weekly deals newsletter, and start putting aside a little spending cash for the busy Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping events.