In a world filled with seemingly endless shopping opportunities, it can be pretty time consuming to find the best Cyber Monday and Black Friday deals.
It doesn't take long to find a site claiming to have the "best deal" or the "lowest prices."
But are those claims true?
THE QUESTION:
Are Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals the best deals of the year?
THE ANSWER:
They definitely can be, but it’s not an automatic guarantee.
Certain products like electronics tend to have very good prices on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but they may actually wind up lower or equally discounted at other times.
WHAT WE FOUND:
The VERIFY team did something that we would recommend every holiday shopper do as well. We used a price comparison site to check the discounts.
Sites like CamelCamelCamel.com and Keepa.com allow you to check a products previous price history on sites like Amazon.com and some other online retailers.
Here are two examples that help clear up the main question:
As of the writing of this story, the Blendtec "Total Blender Classic" was on sale on Amazon for $280.46. On CamelCamelCamel its highest recorded price was $446.86. It’s lowest recorded price was $159.99. A price that was reached a couple of times in since 2016 including during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping season in 2017.
So if you were looking to buy that blender on Black Friday last year, you’d have had a chance at the best price it had been offered at.
But that doesn’t apply to all products. Take this exercise bike as an example.
As of the writing of this article, it was listed on Amazon at a price of $239.
Go check over on CamelCamelCamel and you’ll find that it’s highest price ever listed came in at $599 and it’s lowest price ever came in at $128.83.
That low price was listed on November 23-24,2019. That’s not Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
Bottom line:
The Claim that Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals are always the best is FALSE.
They definitely can be - but it depends on the product. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are typically great for electronics, but Consumer Reports shows that if you’re looking for other products, the discounts can vary.
The good news is that if you take a minute to check a third party app like Camelcamelcamel, you can make sure you're actually getting the deal you want.