This Christmas Sale Tracker Tells You When to Shop This Season
You can leave the tents, hot coffees and survival snacks at home. In fact, you can even leave yourself at home, because those painstakingly crowded Black Fridays and stressful Cyber Mondays are behind you, my friend. The Wall Street Journal has just launched a Christmas Sale Tracker that might revolutionize your holiday shopping experience.
With more than 44% of the population planning to do their holiday shopping online, this tracker helps you find the absolute lowest price for 10 popular gifts across the web. It offers prices on items like Disney’s Frozen doll set, a Razor electric scooter, a Michael Kors handbag and a Kitchen Aid. It shows prices listed on about 20 major online retailers including Amazon, Walmart and Target. The tracker will collect prices once an hour from now through December 31 to determine the best times to buy those products, how early retailers offer their best deals and how quickly rivals match lower offers.
If what you’re looking for isn’t listed as one of the 10 featured products, WSJ has also put together a comprehensive report on when the best holiday deals are usually offered + dishes out some insight on how major companies strategically fluctuate prices. For example, last month, Amazon featured the Jawbone Up24 (a wearable fitness band) for as little as $110.05 and as much as $129, changing prices 20 times during October alone.
Surprisingly the newspaper and Adobe report that retailers’ prices registered their biggest drops the Monday before Thanksgiving and the cheapest prices overall came on Thanksgiving Day itself. This isn’t to say that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a total waste of time, but the deals offered are usually on a select number of products, in a minimal quantity, which – as well all know – sell out very fast. The retailers’ hope is that even though those insane deals you were after are sold out, you’ll still stick around and find something else to buy.
Another piece of knowledge the WSJ drops is to get your shopping done early. The best deals were offered on the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving (AKA now!) as opposed to the weeks leading up to Christmas. The reason behind this is simple, companies are trying to avoid being overwhelmed by a late influx of online orders that overwhelmed shipping capacity last year and prevented thousands of people from receiving their gifts in time.
We definitely appreciate all the insight and money saving holiday tips, but at the same time, we’re secretly crossing our fingers that Santa will drop by on his sleigh and solve all our Christmas shopping woes. Rudolph, if you’re listening we’ve got some seriously delicious carrot cake with your name on it… just saying.
What gifts are you looking to score a deal on this Christmas? Any tips on how you save money during the holidays? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.
(images via The Wall Street Journal)
