It’s that time of year again: everyone calls it Black Friday, but it would be more correct to speak of Black Week. Discounts leading up to Black Friday (the pre-Christmas shopping day that follows Thanksgiving in the US) last at least a week, if not more, and are literally everywhere.
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Really unmissable offers?
But are we really sure that the offers of these days are unmissable as marketing and advertising suggest? You already know the answer, and it’s no: if it’s true that during the Black Week you can run into some rare occasions, it’s not said that the price offered for the product we’re interested in is the lowest of the year. The first piece of advice pertains to the sphere of consumer psychology: don’t buy anything you don’t really need just because the price is low. If you intend to buy a new computer, a mattress, a television or a hair dryer, buy it only if the price offered to you is the right one for your budget and in relation to your needs.
If, on the other hand, you end up not buying it, don’t regret it: it is very probable that in some time, in a lean period, perhaps after Christmas, the same object will end up again in promotion. In short: not being duped on Black Friday is above all an exercise in self-control.
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Newsletters and Google search
In practice, there are also a number of opportunities that it is always good to check before buying without further research. First check whether the online shop you want to buy from has a newsletter: In most cases there is a bonus for signing up which could add an extra discount. Maybe it can’t be combined with Black Friday offers, but it could actually be activated on products not included in this week’s commercial initiatives, or even offer a similar discount, but without the time limit of the purchase on Black Friday days.
The other thing to do, especially if you’re buying an online service (website hosting, domain, heavily discounted software subscription) it is good to search for the same product on Google. You might be amazed at what and how many discounts you find this way, whether it’s Black Friday or even cumulative with this week’s already discounted prices.
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L’universo amazon
If the offers you are interested in are on Amazon, the opportunities to check the quality of an offer are even greater. Among the Black Friday discounts offered by the world‘s largest e-commerce you can find many good deals, but however, it is good to be careful: the discounts advertised on the site are often not truly unrepeatable and are above all calculated not on the average price of the product up to this moment, but on the list price decided by the seller.
CamelCamelCamel
To really find out what is the average price of a product on Amazon (and therefore what is the real discount we are taking advantage of) there are several useful tools. The most famous has a particular name: CamelCamelCamel. It’s a real one price archive of all (or almost) Amazon products which allows you to access a history of the price list of a specific object. To start a search, just copy the address of the Amazon page we are viewing, paste it in the search field at the top and press enter: the system will immediately show us a graph with price trends.
Let’s take for example a coffee machine on offer at the time of writing. CamelCamelCamel suggests that the price of €279.99 is actually good and is one of the lowest ever recorded. However, there have been rare cases in the past where the product cost even less (€269.10). The site also allows you to enter an email and indicate a target price in the fields immediately above the graph, on the results page: in this way it will be possible to receive a message every time the product touches the price indicated by us. CamelCamelCamel prices are not always up to date (so pay attention to any discrepancies), but the system remains very useful for checking any offers from previous weeks and months.
Keep
Another equally valid tool is Keepa, which in addition to price history also offers very useful graphs on the performance of the product in the rankings and allows a more granular analysis of past offers. Keepa also provides the ability to check eBay offers for the same product and simplifies the search at second-hand dealers. The operation is the same: you open the page, copy-paste the product address on Amazon and press enter to view the offer history.
In the case of the coffee machine in our example, we notice that there have been strange movements before the offer was activated. The price was €299.99 until Thursday 18 November in the early afternoon. The price then shot up to €319 for a few hours, to then drop during the night of November 19 (with the activation of the Black Friday offers) first to €299 and then, one hour later, to €279.
The step up to €299 allows you to bring the discount back within the 10% limit (because Amazon indicates the previous price). However, anyone who had observed the price the day before, already aware that the offers had been announced for November 19, would not have seen €299, but €319.
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Check prices on other e-commerce
The last thing to do before hitting the buy button on an offer is to check the product prices at other online retailers. To do this, you can use sites such as Trovaprezzi, one of the most famous in Italy, or Idealo (which has also been offering a price history verification tool for some time). For non-niche products it is usually difficult to find prices lower than that offered by Amazon, which can count on a much larger sales scale, but a quick search allows you to verify it and be sure that the Black Friday offer on the giant ecommerce is actually the best.