Black Friday Steals and Deals

A few clicks of your mouse will lead you to the best holiday bargains.

- PJ Gach, BettyConfidential.com

Imagine this. While other shoppers are elbowing fellow bargain-hunters out of the way you’re cool, calm and collected as you target the deals you’ve been waiting all year for. Sound like a dream? Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, has traditionally been a bargain shopper’s best dream and worst nightmare. There are deals, steals and amazing bargains. Stores open in the wee small hours of the morning, and people even camp out overnight to be first in line to grab the door-buster specials. To say it can be stressful is an understatement. So how can you find out where the best deals are and get what you want without standing in line? By turning to the Web.

There are a number of websites that focus on Black Friday deals. The best three are: BlackFriday, BlackFriday Ads, and BlackFriday@Gottadeal.com. They do all your homework for you, scanning ads from the major department stores — JC Penney, Macy’s, Best Buy and more. They’ve got the lowdown on Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. If you sign up for alerts, they’ll send you an email the minute a price reduction occurs or if an item that was supposed to be only sold in-store can be bought online instead. And all three allow you to create shopping lists online based on the stores’ ads.

So what are the differences between these seemingly similar sites? From personal experience, BlackFridayAds is usually the first site out of the three to have scans of the ads. They also create product guides and stories on where the top 10 deals can be found

Both BlackFriday@Gottadeal and BlackFridayAds feature sections where shoppers can trade information on deals and steals. BlackFriday is partnered with KeepCash.com, a coupon site.

Now what can an online coupon do for you? Using one in conjunction with an online Black Friday or Cyber Monday deal can lower the cost of the item, possibly give you free shipping and yes, sometimes even net you a free item. Coupon sites have promotional codes that you add to your purchase right before checking out. Last year, Victoria’s Secret had a sale on bras, and if you had the correct coupon code, not only did you get a further reduction on the bra of your choice, you also got free panties. If you had another coupon for free shipping, it seemed as if the store owed you money!

Coupon sites to check out are FatWallet.com, RetailMeNot.com, CouponChief.com, AbleShoppers.com and SlickDeals.net. Coupon sites have deals all year long. You can sign up for their newsletters or their RSS feeds.

So take a tip from BettyConfidential: Instead of going nuts trying to plot out your Black Friday shopping day, simply visit a few sites and your holiday shopping will be a breeze. And probably cheaper too!

PJ Gach is a senior editor at BettyConfidential.

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