The people go crazy for Black Friday and, in some cases, will even fight over what the perceive to be a good deal, the truth is that no everything on sale is particularly good value. That can either be because a deal isn't that much of a discount from the usual saving, or just because the product on sale is a bit pants. For those reasons, I'm not going to be heading out to the local Asda at 6am; instead, Expert Reviews will be scouring the web for the actual best deals. In the meantime, here are some important tips for the day and everything else you need to know about it.
What is Black Friday?
Started in the US, Black Friday comes the day after Thanksgiving, with consumers previously loaded with turkey now loading up on HD TVs and bargain laptops. While we don't celebrate Thanksgiving (yet), the UK has latched onto Black Friday and stores see it as the perfect day to offload stock for cheap and generate hype while doing it.
Black Friday 2015 UK date
November 27th is the official date, although flash sales and Black Friday-related deals will probably start earlier in the week. Amazon's Black Friday is a week long, for example.
Getting a good Black Friday Deal
Retailers aren't stupid. Black Friday is a great opportunity to shift old stock quickly. While the discounts are hard to argue with, it's worth digging a little deeper to find out exactly how much of a discount you're getting. Retailers will always make their discounts look as big as possible, typically showing the saving they're offering against the RRP of a product. As a result, some of the 'savings' you're getting on Black Friday aren't as good as you think, with prices perhaps only slightly lower than they were the day before.
If you're shopping on Amazon, CamelCamelCamel is a great tool for finding out exactly what savings you're getting. Type any product name into the search bar and you'll be able to find its price history. In the example below, Amazon has the Philips iron as its Deal of the day on October 28th, selling it for £31.50. It promotes this as a £33.50 saving, against the iron's RRP of £65.
That seems like quite a decent saving. However, on the days leading up to this sale, CamelCamelCamel shows that it was consistently available for around £40. It's still a good saving, but not quite the half-price deal it might appear to be.
An additional handy way of getting an even better deal is to use deal brokering sites such as Flubit. These sites attempt to get a cheaper price on pretty much any product you can think of and are often well worth a try if you're prepared to wait a couple of days for a response. The issue here is that many Black Friday week deals will only last a few hours, but it's still worth checking out if an offer appears to be going for several days.
Check the reviews
It might seem obvious, but with the hype and excitement and "this-hour-only" of Black Friday deals, checking the specifics of the product you're buying can go by the wayside. Checking customer reviews and Expert Reviews will not only let you know whether the product is any good, it'll also tell you how old the product is, as old products may not be very good any more: for example, budget laptops do not age well; if it was £200 in 2011 and it's £150 now, you can get a much better deal on a new budget laptop. See our Best Budget Laptops article, for more information. Regardless of the type of product, it's worth reading reviews and seeing if there are modern, cheaper, alternatives out there before you snap up what you think's a great deal
Black Friday deals 2015
Some tech retailers already have pages up and running for Black Friday, while others simply repurpose their "daily deals" pages. Here are the ones you should be bookmarking. Expert Reviews will also bring you links to the actual best deals once Black Friday starts.
