In all the hype around Black Friday, figuring out whether the discount is a good buy or not can be tricky. Which? recently published research showing that out of 178 deals publicised on Black Friday in 2015, only 90 were actually cheaper than they had been before the sale day.
Retailers from Currys to Amazon all mark their Black Friday deals with magnificent-sounding price cuts, but they are only really useful if you know what price they were before the sale started.
The good news is that for Amazon there’s a quick and easy way to work out whether a deal really is a steal. CamelCamelCamel – odd name, great site – logs the price of products on Amazon over time, so you can see historical prices and whether that “50% off” is the cheapest it has ever been.
Plug in your search terms or the link to the Amazon shopping page and hit go. Select the right product and look at the easy to read chart to see if the deep discount is all that good.
A quick test showed that a 7-inch Fire Tablet at £29.99 was cheaper than previously, while the Reebok ZR8 treadmill was cheaper in January.
Other sites are also available to compare Amazon and other large retailers. One of the easiest to use is Google Shopping – simply search for the product, select the right one and view prices at a collection of retailers to see which is the cheapest.
Perhaps the most useful of tools for comparing retailers is a browser extension called Invisible Hand available for Chrome, Firefox and Safari. The tool sits in your browser and notifies you if a product you’re looking at in one store is available for less in another.
It doesn’t cover every store or product, but Argos, Game, John Lewis, Asda, B&Q, PC Word, Currys, Marks & Spencer, Boots, Very and others are included, as well as a collection of airlines for tickets. It won’t show you whether the discount is any cheaper than it was before the sale, but it will show if it’s currently available for cheaper from somewhere else.
Find discount codes all year round for large technology retailers by visiting discountcodes.theguardian.com
