Rocking Black Friday

Yesterday morning, we published a post with some thoughts on Black Friday deals. Today, we bring you a few tips as you continue to wade through the weekend’s deals:

1) Monitor shopping portals

At this time of year, I believe that CashBackMonitor refereshes their feed more than the usual once-per-day. Keep an eye out for mid-day changes in cash back as portals compete for your business. There are some fantastic payouts available at a few popular stores. Yesterday, we wrote about Dell offering up to 21.5% cash back through BeFrugal. That payout is still alive and matches nicely with many of their deals — especially those bundling a Dell eGift card on top of the cash back. See that post for a couple of examples.

TopCashBack also continues to offer 25% cash back at eBags. As we wrote yesterday, that gives you an opportunity to save big on rarely-discounted items — in some cases, more than half off Tumi bags, but a reader also commented to say that he had stacked some savings on Patagonia gear (another rarely-discounted brand).

Don’t forget to compare portal payouts and leverage opportunities to Extreme Stack by combining Amex Offers, gift cards, and opportunities to double and triple dip (see our Instant Gift Card Deals resource page for options to buy and receive instantly or near-instantly and save).

2) Comparison shop

As we mentioned yesterday, price protection can be a great benefit to leverage at this time of year. If Store A is offering huge portal rewards, but Store B has a better price, you don’t necessarily have to choose one or the other. You could potentially have your cake and eat it too….and if that’s not a proper sentiment for the day after Thanksgiving, I don’t know what is….

3) Compare historical Amazon prices using CamelCamelCamel

CamelCamelCamel.com is a tool I’ve been using for years to compare current pricing against historical pricing. I find it particularly useful at times like these when items are discounted across many retailers. In my post about eBags yesterday, I highlighted a specific Tumi bag I like. That bag is on sale right now for about the same price at Amazon as it is at eBags. If I didn’t have access to historical information, it would be hard to know whether today’s price is actually special or just a typical discount that repeats regularly. I can either type the name of the item into the search box at CamelCamelCamel or just copy and paste the URL for the product on Amazon:

After I do that, it’ll give me a historical pricing graph where I can see Amazon’s pricing (I could also check 3rd party new and used prices as well if I were reselling and wanted to get an idea of the trends).

That data is incredibly useful for me. I can see the general trend in graph form as well as the highest / lowest prices and the last 5 price changes. That’s helpful on just about any product as I find the Amazon price to be a decent barometer of the marketplace as a while.

4) Don’t forget about Chase 10x at Walmart and Best Buy

As we reported yesterday, Chase is offering 10x on Sapphire and Freedom cards through Chase Pay at Best Buy and Walmart (click those store names to see the related posts). The catch is this: Best Buy is in-store only and Walmart.com is online-only. There have been a number of reports of Walmart.com order cancellations for gift card orders – it might be worth finding a couple of other items to order to start, and with Black Friday sales on (and Cyber Monday around the corner), that shouldn’t be too hard. In-store Best Buy purchases are already reporting the full 10x — we’ve had a report in the Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group showing the full 10x:

I’m happy to have the Walmart option as an online option since I can then combine it with portal rewards — which have been increasing in recent months. Remember those payouts are good for a few weeks — so if you don’t see something today, you might want to hold out for Cyber Monday at Walmart (though remember that Best Buy is in-store only).

5) Check online-only stores…you don’t necessarily have to wait for Cyber Monday

There are many online-only stores that will continue to have good sales online today, but you may also be able to snag some great deals at these stores on Monday. Most major online stores probably won’t offer worse deals on Monday than they are today. Will there still be 21.5% cash back at Dell on Monday? I have no idea….but they will probably still be selling the same models of TV and laptops on Monday. You may be able to buy today and get Monday’s price (though YMMV since your credit card may want you to ask for a price adjustment first — and that would likely invalidate your cash back). It might be worth a shot with the high payouts that are on at some places right now.

6) Check for gift card deals

Many retailers are running gift card deals — this morning there have been deals on Ikea Gift cards and iTunes gift cards — there will surely be many more to come. We’ll post if we see something likely to last long enough to get it on the deal, and that leads us to the last tip…

7) Check back with us

As always, we’ll post an assortment of deals we find here at Frequent Miler, so be sure to check back and/or subscribe to emails and Twitter/Facebook alerts for the latest.

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