If you were too comatose from Thanksgiving revelry to peel yourself out of bed at the crack of dawn today to score Black Friday deals, don't worry—Cyber Monday's on its way, and you can get great deals from the couch.
Photo by Lisa Omarali.
Cyber Monday, for the unfamiliar, is the Monday after Black Friday and a day where online retailers offer steep discounts—essentially their version of Black Friday. If you refused to get up at 3AM on Black Friday and brave the cold and grouchy shoppers—and we hardly blame you if you did!—Cyber Monday is chance to score steep discounts. How do you separate the awesome deals from the lukewarm ones? Below, we're going to walk you through a few of our favorite deals sites, then offer some tips for successfully navigating them on your way to a good deal.
Hit Up The Deal Aggregators
Deal sites specialize in aggregating deals and organizing them so you can easily find what you're looking for. The best deals sites are those with a large index of deals and an even larger user base. The best kind of deals sites are the ones where you can read the comments from other users; detailed and critical comments often point you in the direction of even better deals. Photo by Bhanu Tadinada.
Slickdeals: Hit up the front page to check out a constantly updated roll of deals plus see expired deals to get a bead on what products are going for. Clicking on individual deals gives you additional information, comments, and the aggregate score that Slickdeals readers have given it. If you want more information you can jump into the forums and read up on currently deals. If you really want to dive in, hit up the Black Friday/Cyber Monday forum; it's going full tilt as deals are debated, hashed over, promoted, and flagged as out of stock. While the Cyber Monday forum is your best bet for the most current posts, you can also visit the Hot Deals forum.
Fat Wallet: Another deal aggregator with a massive base of dealhounds, Fat Wallet collects hot deals on their front page. The real value at Fat Wallet, however, is the active forums. Right now there are wall-to-wall posts in their Black Friday forum about current Black Friday deals and the coming Cyber Monday loot.
DealNews: Dealnews lacks user forums but sports handpicked deals—deals good enough to score it the 3rd place in the Best Deal-Hunting Sites Hive Five. Keep an especially close eye on the Editor's Choice corner now and until Cyber Monday as the site Editors hand-pick their favorite Cyber Monday deals.
RetailMeNot: If you're not currently using this site, you're missing out. Simply checking it before placing any order online can save you as little as a few bucks on shipping to a wad of cash with a 50% off coupon. RetailMeNot has a special Cyber Monday page set up with coupon codes from thousands of retailers. One of the benefits of using RetailMeNot is the feedback on the coupons; each coupon has a badge beside it indicating the reported success rate.
It's worth noting that there is an official Cyber Monday web site. The site only collects deal data from major participating retailers, however, and offers no comparison of deals or discussion.
Now that you've got a few places to look, let's talk about how to use the deal sites to your advantage.
How to Benefit from Deal Site
Most deal sites are comprised almost entirely of deal hunting hobbyists. They've made finding deals, comparison shopping, and helping others find deals practically a part-time job. While the layout of each deal-hunting site is slightly different, it pays to focus your search in a few ways. Photo by Spirit-Fire.
Find the forums. Before you've even fired up your favorite price comparison site or app, the deal hounds are already picking apart and analyzing the deal in ways a price comparison engine can't begin to. You'll hear if the deal is better or worse than last Cyber Monday's offerings, the prices offered elsewhere, combos and coupons the deal can be combined with, or even the prices offered from the same retailer a week earlier and how they compare. You'll get a nearly instant idea of whether or not you're going to score big or get a ho-hum deal on what you're looking for.
Use the rating system to your advantage. Most deal sites have some sort of user-driven rating. Fatwallet has red/green bars beside each forum post indicating the disapproval/approval of the users. Slickdeals has a thumbs up/down system. Focus on posts and listings that have a high user approval rate. Remember, the committed users of these deal sites are practically deal forensic specialists.
Participate, however briefly. Most of us are not full-time deal-hunters. I, as an example, tend to get a laser light focus when I'm hunting for a deals, learning all about products and prices in the process before scoring my deal and abandoning the deal sites. I make it a point before easing off on my obsessive deal hunting to rank some deals related to my current obsession. In participating, whether it's offering an answer to another deal hunter or rating a few coupons as active or inactive, strengthens the deal hunting network and makes it easier for others to score some extra money off. During furious shopping periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday participation can help everyone cut through the crap faster and get to the good deals.
You know where to look, what to do when you get there, now it's time to make a list and check it twice before scoring some Cyber Monday loot.
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