DEAL HUNTING

Find the perfect steal this Black Friday

CAN NOVEMBER really be rolling round again? Yup, and that can only mean one thing. No, not the election, but Black Friday, none other than the best day of the year to get great deals on PC kit. But how, exactly, do you get the best deals, and how does it all work?

The easy answer is to log on to the websites of MPC’s sister titles, including www.techradar. com, www.tomshardware.com and www.pcgamer.com and allow them to do the heavy lifting for you, all neatly categorized and simple to select. But that leaves the question of how those websites themselves go about selecting the best deals.

You’re in luck, for your erstwhile correspondent has been a member of the crack deal team on several occasions. Here’s your behind-the-scenes peak at how it all works, and what that means for you and getting the best deals. –JEREMY LAIRD

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MANUAL WORK AND DEAL-MAKING

The first and perhaps most surprising fact about Black Friday deals is that it’s all essentially done manually. In an age where AI is all the rage, you might think that choosing deals would lend itself nicely to an algorithm or three. Nope. As in many other disciplines, the scope of AI is exaggerated, and it’s humans that add the value. Actually, the fact that deal listings aren’t done by AI says a lot about the true maturity of that so-called technology. But that’s a story for another day.

>> The next surprising fact is that it’s relatively laborious and depends significantly on existing knowledge, and not just using the right search tools. Many leading etailers, including Amazon, the 800-pound gorilla of online outlets, don’t make it entirely easy to find deals in specific categories. Yes, filters can be applied, but they don’t always work reliably or as expected. So a heap of manual trawling goes into the mix.

>> What you probably won’t be surprised to learn about, if you didn’t already know, is the kickback for websites recommending deals, otherwise known as affiliate commission. In short, the website recommending the deal gets a small cut if you link through and buy. If that sounds at all rotten, it’s not. Serious players in deal listings have arrangements with all the major etailers, thus the interests of the websites listing deals are perfectly aligned with yours. The better the deal they point you at, the more likely you are to buy and earn them a little cut.

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PRICING AND EXPERIENCE

But what of pricing, surely the most critical factor in any deal worth the name? Pretty much all participating etailers play it fairly fast and loose with their definition of a deal. In other words, the advertized saving isn’t always what it seems. It may not be indexed against the price just before Black Friday, but compared to another earlier and higher price that was only instituted relatively briefly and isn’t terribly representative of a given product’s typical cost. Overcoming that involves a combination of experience and a few online tools.

>> For Amazon there’s a handy tool for tracking any deal against its historical price. Simply load up https:// camelcamelcamel.com [ and drop the product’s Amazon URL into the search field and, boom, you’ll see if the deal price is actually any good. There are more generic tools, like https://pcpartpicker.com and Google Shopping, which can be very useful. The problem, however, can be timeliness. Some of the best deals are gone in a flash. That’s where experience counts. The ability to quickly recognize a good deal without the need to cross-reference historical pricing saves critical time.

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BUYER’S GUIDE

As for what you, the actual deal-shopper, should do, we’d recommend combining the best of MPC’s sister websites with a little manual searching of your own. By using the likes of techradar.com, tomshardware.com and pcgamer.com, you’re benefitting from a dedicated team of deal-hunters who can cover far more of the web than you could on your own.

>> The catch is that some of the best deals appear and disappear so fast that solely relying on deals fed to you by third parties could mean missing out. So it’s a good idea to have the relevant sections of several of the top etailers saved as browser favorites for easy access. Also consider signing up for various early-access memberships, such as Amazon Prime.