How to find the best deals during Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2022

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Even though Amazon just wrapped its fall Prime Day event, 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 tablets, phones, TVs, gaming gear, and other tech throughout the deals-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, 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 set up with a price-tracking tool. We’ve included a few of our favorite examples below, pointing out how each can help you track deals in slightly different ways, each with its own special features.

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

CamelCamelCamel

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 also 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, 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 United States, the United Kingdom, 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.

Honey

Like CamelCamelCamel, the Honey browser extension 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.

Slickdeals

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 recently rolled out a Black Friday component that allows you to browse circulars for Best Buy, Target, and other retailers in advance.

PC Part Picker

As you might have guessed with the name, PC Part Picker helps you determine which PC components are compatible with one another and which are not, making the already daunting task of piecing together a DIY PC setup a little easier.

That by itself makes it a crucial tool for both veterans and people who are new to building PCs, but it’s also an excellent price tracker, one that shows you a detailed graph illustrating the current and prior movement in the price for a particular component. It lets you build the PC of your dreams, and it can alert you via email to price drops for each component from big retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg, B&H Photo, and more. That way you can wait to buy everything until that processor or graphics card comes down to a lower price, one you know it has hit before.

Microsoft Edge

For a more hands-off approach to seeing if you’re getting a good deal, just use the Microsoft Edge browser. For the past couple of years, the browser has been able to tell you when you’re looking at the best price for a particular product from a range of retailers. If you are, it will tell you. If not, it will direct you to a retailer where you can get a better deal. It’s as simple as that. Microsoft Edge is available on Windows PC, macOS, and Linux, as well as Android and iOS.

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 25th, in this case — the truth is that several retailers (read: Best Buy) have already jumped the gun and begun to offer some great deals in the lead-up to the shopping holiday. So, bookmark our coverage, follow us on Twitter, and start putting aside a little spending cash for the busy Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping events.