Holiday Shopping is upon us and last week we focused on creating wishlists so friends and family would know what to get you.  Now it is time to look on the other side of the wall and focus on the gift buying.  Traditionally, holiday shopping has been done between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve.  Many shoppers begin their conquest the day after Thanksgiving and have managed to create the monster we now call Black Friday.  I honestly don’t remember this being such a big day 10 or 15 years ago, but NOW!!

Black Friday has become THE premier shopping day of the year.  Retailers, in their infinite wisdom, have made it impossible to have a Thanksgiving day without the rustle of papers and bargain-hunting conversations.  Shoppers now debate an afternoon nap and then a trip to the Best Buy to stand in line til the wee hours of the morning, just waiting for the doors to open and the madness to begin.  Who can blame them?  The prices are amazing and, given the current economic trouble, we would all like to save as much of our hard-earned cash as possible.  Luckily, Black Friday has grown to include a larger audience and the internet is now a prime shopping location for those who aren’t looking to lose sleep on a perfectly good day off.

Online retailers, like Amazon.com and Buy.com, began offering Daily Deals a few years ago and traditional retailers, like Target, have started doing the same.  These Daily Deals are HUGE 1-day savings on all kinds of items.  If you are lucky enough to get to them before the rest of the world, you can save big bucks while doing your holiday shopping.  Other retailers have turned to “Black Friday” specials that happen BEFORE Thanksgiving.  Specifically Sears is hyping the Black Friday sales every Saturday before the real Black Friday.  Everyone wants your business and you are in the drivers seat.  You get to choose where and when you shop.  The only question is, how do you manage all the information?

While their isn’t one clear winner in the Holiday Bargain Information Management area, there are a few tools that will help make the onslaught of info a but more manageable.

1. Black Friday 2009 – (found at http://bfads.net) is tracking all of the Black Friday information for you and holding their own contests where they are giving away laptops and gaming systems.
2. BlackFriday.info – This great site hosts all of the Black Friday information that is being released, as it happens.  You can already shop some of the ads from retailers like Kohls and Sam’s club.
3. Facebook – Most companies now have a presence on Facebook and if you become a “fan” of each of the places you shop, you’ll get updates on specials and daily deals.
4. Twitter – Just like Facebook, you can “follow” the companies you might shop with and wait for the deals to get delivered to you.
5. Email – Sign up on a favorite retailer’s site and they will email you their deals daily.
6. Favorites - Don’t want to get bombarded by emails and messages?  Just create a folder of favorites in your browser and look at them when you want.  Remember, you are in control.

So, if you don’t want to wait in those lines and fight those crowds, you can begin arming yourself with all the information you will need to complete your holiday shopping online.  Just sign up, sit back and relax.  The deals will come and you can sleep in on the Friday after Turkey-day!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 10:10 am and is filed under Online Shopping, Tips and Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.