Find The Perfect Black Friday Deal

CAN NOVEMBER really be rolling around again? Yep, and that can only mean one thing—Black Friday is just around the corner. It’s the best day of the year to get great deals on PC kit, but how do you get the best deals and how, exactly, does it all work?

The easy answer is to log on to the websites of MaximumPC’s sister titles, including www. techradar.com, www.tomshardware.com and www.pcgamer.com and let them do the heavy lifting for you. All the best deals are 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 peek at how it all works, and what that means for you and getting the best deals. –JEREMY LAIRD

YOU’LL NEED THIS

A WEB BROWSER

Some deal-listing sites, and

your favorite etailers.

1

MANUAL WORK AND DEAL-MAKING

The first and perhaps most surprising fact about Black Friday deals is that it’s all done manually. In an age where AI is all the rage, you might think that choosing deals would lend itself nicely to an algorithm. As in many other disciplines, the scope of AI has been exaggerated, and it’s humans that add the value. The fact that deal listings aren’t done by AI says a lot about the 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 behemoth of online outlets, don’t make it particularly 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 may not be surprised to learn about is the kickback for websites recommending deals, otherwise known as affiliate commission. Many websites display a message saying, “When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission”. In short, the website recommending the deal gets a small cut if you link through and buy. If that sounds fishy, it isn’t. Serious players in deal listings have arrangements with all the major etailers, so 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 advertised 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 in place for a relatively brief time and isn’t terribly representative of a 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 [ Image A] and drop the product’s Amazon URL into the search field and you’ll see whether the deal price is actually any good. There are more generic tools, such as https://pcpartpicker.com and Google Shopping, which can also be 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 deal-shopper, should do, we’d recommend combining the best of MaximumPC’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.