Let us, and these price-tracking sites, do all of the work
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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the biggest shopping days of the year, a relentless, deals-packed weekend when you can find the best prices on tech products like laptops, 4K TVs, phones, and more. And of course, these good deals are all accessible online.
You can count on us to publish the best deals that you need to know about, but if you want to be among the first people to discover price drops on products youre interested in, youll want to get set up with a price-tracking site. Weve included a few of our favorite examples below, pointing out how each can help you track deals in slightly different ways, with their own special features.
All of them are free to use, and once youve added products that youre interested in keeping an eye on, you can rest easy knowing that you dont need to take any extra action until it comes time to make a purchase.
CamelCamelCamel tracks the price of every product sold on Amazon and can send you alerts when they fall as low as youd like. Once a product reaches a desired price youve set or lower, youll get an email about it. This price tracker works only for products on Amazon, so youll need to use a different one below if you want to track price movement on Walmart, Best Buy, and others.
To track prices and get alerts via email, youll need to create a free account. Also, I suggest installing the sites browser extension, called The Camelizer, which lets you see pricing trends on a product-by-product basis and allows you to set your desired price without navigating away from Amazon. Its fantastic and easy to use.
As soon as one of the products falls below the amount set on your price alert, youll instantly get an email. And if you already have a wishlist saved on Amazon, you can import it to CamelCamelCamel.
Like CamelCamelCamel, the Honey browser extension can track the prices of items that youre 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.
Honey works with Amazon and many other retailers, and you can add items to your Droplist, which is basically just a wishlist. On Best Buy, for example, the option to add an item to your list pops up on the products image, and you can select the price watch duration as well as the percentage off that youre looking for.
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 create deal alerts based on keywords, but they work a little differently on Slickdeals than they do with the above sites.
You can type in a product name, like Nintendo Switch or a retailers name, and once its added to your list, youll 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 youll 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.
As you might have guessed with the name, PC Part Picker helps you pick PC components that are compatible with each other, making the already daunting task of piecing together a DIY PC setup a little easier.
That by itself makes it a crucial tool, but its also an excellent price tracker, showing you a detailed graph that illustrates the current and prior movement in price for a particular component. It lets you build the PC of your dreams, and it can alert you via email to price drops from big retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg, B&H Photo, and more. That way, you can, say, choose to wait to buy everything until that processor or graphics card comes down to a lower price you know its hit before.
Trust the experts
Were a discerning bunch here at The Verge, so dont fret if youre going into Black Friday / Cyber Monday without any prep. Well 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. So mark November 26th through the 30th on your calendar but keep an eye on our coverage, because many vendors are jumping the gun and offering some great prices already. Then bookmark our coverage, and start putting aside a little spending cash.