How to shop like a pro during Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Despite Amazon and other retailers having filled the summer and fall months with more sales than ever before, Black Friday and Cyber Monday remain the biggest shopping days of the year. Thankfully, like in previous years, we’ll be working to highlight the best prices on phones, TVs, headphones, gaming gear, and other tech throughout the deal-packed week, whether you plan to shop in person or online.

You can always count on us to publish the best deals that you need to know about, no matter the season; however, if you want to be among the first people to discover price drops on the products you’re interested in, you’ll want to get a head start on your Black Friday game plan. Your checklist should include scoping out early sales at your favorite retailers, setting up the right price-tracking tool, and configuring your alerts to make sure you don’t miss rare discounts at Amazon and elsewhere. Lucky for you, we’ve compiled several tips and tricks below to help you get started.

Leverage a price-tracking tool or deal aggregator

The most powerful way to track down a truly great deal is to set up a price-tracking tool. We’ve included a few of our favorite examples below, many of which we use on a daily basis here at The Verge. Each can help you track deals at various retailers — including Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, and Target — but they each do so differently and come with their own set of advantages / disadvantages.

All of them are free to use, and once you’ve added the products you’re interested in keeping an eye on, you can rest easy knowing that you don’t need to take any action until it comes time to make a purchase. Just make sure you keep your email notifications on so you see the alerts as they come in.

CamelCamelCamel tracks the price of every product sold on Amazon and can send you alerts when an item falls to a certain threshold. Once a product reaches the desired price you’ve set or lower, you’ll get an email about it. You can use the extension’s price graph to determine what price is likely to happen, but it’s always a shot in the dark. This price tracker only works for products on Amazon, so you’ll need to use one of the trackers featured below if you want to track price fluctuations at Walmart, Best Buy, and other retail sites.

To track prices and get alerts via email, you’ll need to create a free CamelCamelCamel account. Additionally, we suggest installing the site’s browser extension, The Camelizer, which currently works with Google Chrome, Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Microsoft Edge. The handy tool lets you see pricing trends on a product-by-product basis and allows you to set your desired price without having to navigate away from Amazon. It’s fantastic, easy to use, and works in a number of countries, including the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, and Australia.

As soon as a product falls below the amount set on your price alert, you’ll instantly get an email. And if you already have a wishlist saved on Amazon, you can easily import it into CamelCamelCamel.

Like CamelCamelCamel, Keepa is another handy tool for tracking the prices of products on Amazon. Keepa has charts that track pricing trends and can alert you when it finds a deal. You can also import any of your Amazon wishlists.

Unlike CamelCamelCamel, however, you don’t necessarily need to create an account to track prices with Keepa; just install the extension, and Keepa will automatically add a price history graph to supported product listings. The embedded graph showcases pricing history and allows you to specify various pricing details. If you set a desired price, Keepa will send you a price alert via email, push notification, Telegram, or RSS.

Like CamelCamelCamel, PayPal Honey (formerly just “Honey”) is a browser extension that can track the prices of items that you’re interested in, and it will alert you when it finds a deal. However, unlike the price-tracking site above, Honey will also scour each site you visit for offer codes that can be applied to your checkout total to save you even more money. Look for the orange Honey icon that will appear on the right side of your browser window when you land on a product page (you can move its location as you see fit, but that’s where it appears by default). If you click that icon, you can view coupon opportunities, take a closer look at historical pricing info, and compare pricing across a variety of retailers.

Honey works with Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and a number of other prominent retailers, and you can add items to your “Droplist,” which is a wishlist-meets-price watch list. The convenient Honey add-on also offers a “Smart Droplist” feature, which automatically adds frequently viewed items to your Droplist. Just don’t be surprised when you get the occasional automated email about an odd item. And if some of the alerts are for too-good-to-be-true prices on Amazon that are gone by the time you click on them, it’s likely the work of some crafty third-party sellers that hijacked the main listing for a short while. But don’t let it discourage you too much.

Slickdeals aggregates some of the best deals around the internet, as discovered by its team and community of users. Its site also allows you to browse coupons and create deal alerts based on specific keywords, though the latter work a little differently on Slickdeals than they do with the above sites.

You can type in a product name, like “Nintendo Switch OLED,” “Sonos,” or a retailer’s name, and once it’s added to your list, you’ll be notified of a deal alert if it meets your criteria. You can set it to alert you to literally any deal relating to your keyword, or you can filter out deals so that you’ll be notified if, for example, the deal is popular enough to make it to Slickdeals’ front page or if it earned a high rating from the community. If you like browsing deals, it’s generally good advice to visit Slickdeals frequently, especially since it usually has a Black Friday component that allows you to browse circulars for Best Buy, Target, and other retailers in advance.

For a more hands-off approach to seeing if you’re getting a good deal, try using your browser. For a few years now, Microsoft Edge has been able to tell you when you’re looking at the best price for a particular product from a range of retailers, and Google Chrome can track price fluctuations and notify you when a particular product goes on sale. Edge and Chrome are both available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, as well as Android and iOS.

Set up deal alerts for Alexa or the Amazon app

If you have a newer Alexa-compatible device, such as a fourth-gen Echo speaker or an Echo Show 5, you can ask the virtual assistant to alert you when specific products go on sale. You can receive alerts up to 24 hours in advance of planned price drops for eligible products, or as soon as it notices a discount on anything saved in your shopping cart or wish list. If you say, “Alexa, buy it for me,” after being notified of the deal, the assistant will purchase the item for you once the discount becomes available.

To enable these features, open the Alexa app on your smartphone and navigate to More > Settings > Notifications > Amazon Shopping. Then, toggle the slider beside Deal Recommendations within the Shopping Recommendations section. Alexa will audibly notify you of deals moving forward, but if you miss one, you can check for the notification on your phone or see whether you have any new notifications on an Echo device by checking for the yellow light. If it’s lit, just say, “Alexa, read my notifications.”

You can receive similar notifications on your smartphone from the Amazon Shopping app, too. Just open the app and go to Settings > Notifications > Deals and recommendations, and toggle the slider beside the Savings option.

Check retailer schedules and plan for early shopping events

Keeping an eye on preferred retailers before Black Friday will help save you time (and money). Several major retailers have already detailed their plans in the run-up to the holidays, and many of them will be offering early opportunities to save. For example:

You can expect more major retailers — Amazon included — to detail their Black Friday plans shortly, so keep an eye on their respective websites and start filling your calendar in.

Pay close attention to lightning deals and doorbusters

Doorbusters, lightning deals, and other limited discount opportunities are a tried-and-true hallmark of any Black Friday sale. They’ll usually be the most buzzworthy deals you’ll see all year, with insanely low prices to spark impulsive spending. As you’re checking ads, make special note of these deals and read all of the fine print surrounding their availability. Some may require you to sign up in advance or get in line early (ahem, Amazon), and some can be so scarce that you won’t have the entire weekend — or even an hour — to claim them.

Have a price-matching backup plan

Although many stores will automatically match their competitors’ pricing, sometimes, you may need to twist their arm. It’s helpful to know the various price-matching policies of each retailer in the event that your preferred store runs out of stock on certain goods. You can get up to speed with our price-matching guide, which details the lengths each retailer will or won’t go to win your dollar. Unfortunately, some retailers put a temporary halt on their usual policies during special shopping events like Black Friday, but it never hurts to ask.

Trust the experts

We’re a discerning bunch here at The Verge, so don’t fret if you’re going into Black Friday / Cyber Monday without any prep. We’ll be corralling the best deals on tech and keeping our coverage up to date with new sale items while eliminating old ones to avoid any disappointment. While we usually suggest paying attention to deals starting the day after Thanksgiving — or November 29th, in this case — the truth is that several retailers typically jump the gun and start offering some great deals in the lead-up to the shopping holiday.

To catch every opportunity to save, be sure to bookmark our coverage, follow us on X, subscribe to our weekly deals newsletter, and start putting aside a little spending cash for the busy Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping events.