It’s not a holiday because we still have to go into work. It’s not an event, either – Alibaba’s Singles Day in China got Taylor Swift. It’s a sale but, if we’re honest, it’s the best sale all year.
Black Friday is eight days long this year (from Friday November 22 to Friday November 29), which cleverly gets Amazon and co two Black Fridays rather than one. We’ve already made peace with that. The early deals started more than a week in advance the main Black Friday deals are now live. Amazon’s Cyber Monday deals start on a Saturday (November 30). The deals, it seems, never stop.
But we want you to be able to look yourself in the mirror once the Black Friday sales are over. Don’t rush into foolish buys just because the internet is pushing you to. Do some research, download a price tracker and save money on good quality, recommended products. Let’s get into it.
It's Prime Day 2023, so we've uncovered the top discounts. Check out the best Prime Day deals in the UK here.
This is actually really easy if you have the time and mental energy to do a teeny bit of research.
If you’re planning to do quite a bit of sales shopping on Amazon, we’d recommend downloading a price tracking tool. On the WIRED team, we use a couple of tools. First, you can try Keepa which is available in the form of browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox (including mobile on Android), Opera and Edge for Windows 10.
There’s also Camelcamelcamel, which has a browser add-on with the excellent name of The Camelizer for Firefox and Chrome. Keepa says that it tracks the prices of 1,000 million Amazon products, Camelcamelcamel 18 million Amazon products.
When you’re manually hunting for and checking deals, your friend here is the glanceable price charts these tools provide – you can quickly see if the price has just plummeted that day or if it was raised recently to produce an artificial discount.
Some UK retailers such as Currys PC World specify underneath the price which dates the product was on sale for the higher price. But most retailers will simply cross out the original RRP - which could have been the price set years ago in some instances – and display the overall ‘saving’ despite the fact the item may have been priced lower than the higher RRP for instance, a few months ago.
If you’re not shopping on Amazon, another quick way to double check the price is by sticking the product name into Google and looking at the Google Shopping pop up box next to the link results, which should display the current prices from major retailers. That gives you a sense if the deal is exclusive to that retailer or whether that’s basically just the price of that product now.
The other bonus of a price tracking tool is that you can set up Amazon price drop alerts on specific devices you’d like to watch – you set the threshold and then receive notifications via email and Twitter when using Camelcamelcamel.
Some devices are essentially always on sale so don’t feel the pressure to click ‘buy’. Top of this category are Amazon’s own devices - Echo Dots, Kindles, Fire HD tablets - all will be discounted for Black Friday, then no doubt again for Christmas/Boxing Day sales and on and on through the spring sales, May bank holiday sales and Prime Day next year.
Similarly, excellent products such as UE’s Bluetooth speakers and Philips Hue smart light bulbs pop up again and again. The other way to look at this is: don’t buy one of these products for full price.
On the flip side, certain brands, such as Apple and Sonos, are much less frequently part of the deals lists, even more so for certain product lines. So if you see these brands discounted, it’s probably worth a look.
Double check the model numbers and full specs, especially on laptops and TVs, which can get confusing. You may think you’re getting a cheap 2019 model when in fact it’s the old 2017 model for £50 less than a much better option.
You don’t need to buy a 5G smartphone, or a folding phone, and you probably don’t need an 8K TV just yet. Don’t get suckered in by very new technologies even if there’s money to be ‘saved’, especially if you’re not usually an early adopter. 5G phones and 8K TVs, for most people, can wait until 2020.
Black Friday is a great time to buy what we like to refer to as admin tech. You know what we mean: portable chargers, adapters, SD cards, hard drives. The stuff you begrudgingly spend money on but that always comes in handy. You can't buy too much of this stuff in the sales.
Likewise, if you’re hoping to get a tasty deal on a laptop or TV, it helps to keep an open mind. Set a budget, set a minimum spec and then see what comes up - the best deals will probably be reserved for Friday 29th November but there have been a lot of early deals this year.
Some brands and shops announce all deals in advance, others don’t. Google has announced a bunch of Pixel and Home deals in advance whereas Amazon has only announced the dates of its sales, not what you can expect to find on sale.
Check our WIRED Recommends guides and full reviews for guidance, when in doubt. Bear in mind that reviews are written with the full RRP in mind, so don’t let the fact a product didn’t score full marks put you off too much if the review is mainly positive.
A lot of tech brands, online retailers and publishers stand to make a hell of a lot of money over the coming six weeks, and in particular over the next eight days. And it’s worth remembering that in most cases, the incentive is to get you to click and to get you to buy.
That’s nothing new, of course, shops have been running limited time only sales, such as the classic Boxing Day sales, for time immemorial. Now, though, everyone in the pipeline between you and that half price slow cooker gets a cut of the overall sale and retailers tend to offer better rates and bonuses at this time of year.
And full disclosure, WIRED operates an affiliate scheme with Amazon and most major UK retailers via a third party scheme. This means we get a small commission when our readers buy something through our links.
Some publishers and social media ‘influencers’ on say YouTube and Instagram, make a higher percentage of their total annual revenue from affiliates than others. This might be reflected in the quantity, presentation and tone of their deals coverage, particularly around Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
WIRED will be publishing more deals coverage than usual over the Black Friday period. All the stories are written by our editorial team and our aim is to provide a sensibly sized edit of the deals that are worth your time. Our deals stories will also be easy enough to ignore for readers that aren’t interested.
The most ethical and eco-conscious purchase is no purchase at all, but if you’ve clicked on this article that’s not very helpful advice for your immediate purposes.
We’re seeing lots more refurbished devices, from the likes of Amazon and Sonos, discounted in online sales. Tech manufacturers have also become markedly more impressive in terms of better trade-in programs for smartphones, in particular. It’s to boost slowing sales, sure, but it also slashes the price and, depending on each manufacturer’s practices, returns the materials to them rather than going straight to landfill.
One question which comes up more and more is the issue of whether it’s possible to avoid Amazon over the pre-Christmas, shopping period, should you want to. Black Friday and Prime Day tend to bring allegations around working conditions back into the conversation – the WIRED US cover story this month covers negotiations between workers and management in fulfilment centres.
If that's a consideration for you, there’s no getting round the fact that Amazon often does have the absolute lowest price – it’s very aggressive on price matching during this period. Sometimes the difference will be £10 for a budget product, or £50 for something mid-range so that’s a calculation for each shopper to make.
As for the ethical standards of specific brands, if you’re trying to choose between Samsung and Google, for instance, it’s difficult to cut through the noise of competing pledges on renewable energy, workers’ rights and sustainable materials which can often be for show. Independent resources such as Ethical Consumer’s database are a good place to start.
Another quick note: Alibaba’s logistics arm Cainiao made November 20 ‘cardboard recycling day’ to follow Singles Day, with recycling stations at its centres for customers to return the packaging from the 1.3 billion home delivery orders. That’s straightforward enough to do yourself in the UK.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
