Black Friday or Christmas sales - which is best?

MSE_Laura_F

I'll get things started with the first question.

Am I more likely to find a bigger discount during Black Friday OR the pre-Christmas sales?

MSE_Oliver

Here is a transcript of the video above:

So any big sell event is going to have its fair share of good deals and bad deals. We like to call them deals and duds - a lot of people think that Black Friday is nothing but duds which isn't the case, but there is a lot of hype around it, and it's really important not to get caught up in that sales hype and not buy things on impulse. Always do your price comparisons to check that you are actually getting a deal.

Now as for Black Friday versus the Christmas sales - so we're talking about the sales that start just a few days before Christmas - well, there is no hard and fast rule because we are talking about 1000s of deals. But Laura Berry who's a member of the Deals team here at MSE, she did some great research on a large selection of items in the Black Friday sale last year compared to last year’s Christmas sales. And what she found was that, in the majority of cases, the biggest discounts were on Black Friday itself. Around 54% of products were cheaper on Black Friday, about 20% were the same price as they were in the Christmas sales, and then the rest were cheaper in the run up to Christmas.

So if you've got products you’re planning to buy and you find that good deal on Black Friday, well, if you’re thinking ‘maybe I’ll wait and see if it gets cheaper at Christmas‘, that’s a little bit of a risk – it may not pay off.