What to know about pre-Black Friday shopping. 

<div class="block">Major retailers like Amazon are having sales and deals days as a precursor to the holiday shopping season. Budgeting expert Andrea Woroch joined <i>Stretching Your Dollar</i> to talk about the ins and outs Amazon&#39;s Prime Big Day Deals. </div>

Stretching Your Dollar

Stretching Your Dollar: Amazon Hosting October Prime Day

For those of you who are shopping or want more information, Amazon is having a huge sales event if you're in the need of anything big or small. Of course, ahead of the very important holiday shopping season, you don't have deja vu though the prime Big Deal Day 2023 comes only a few months after Amazon prime day this summer. But if you missed it the first time around, we are breaking down what you need to know the second time. It's your second chance. So joining me now is money and deals, expert Andrea War and always a pleasure. Let's just start first step. Why is Amazon having yet another Deal Day so close to prime day? So there's a couple of reasons. First of all, people are shopping earlier than ever. We saw last year. People start shopping in September, October. In fact, a new report, a quick take report from bread Financial found that 50% of consumers plan to start shopping by mid to end of October, 76% of shoppers are planning to shop sales events and look for deals and just shop around to save money. So retailers like Amazon want to host these savings events too, you know, give people some savings relief, but there's a benefit to the retailers as well. The more sales events they offer and the earlier they offer these holiday shopping events, the longer they extend that holiday shopping season, giving more opportunities for them to get you to spend your dollars and more opportunities for them to rake in reven. So shop with caution because just because there are sales out there, you could still end up spending more if you overdo it. Ok. Very good advice there any certain windows of time to approach this particular shopping holiday times where you think viewers might be able to save even more money or just simply shop more effectively. Why? So Amazon Prime big deals day event is today tomorrow and they're offering a bunch of different sales event s savings. So you definitely want to come in with a game plan, have your shopping list in mind for the holidays. Also make sure that you have, you know, um things around your house that you might need to replace, take inventory and that's what I would use to help guide your shopping purchases. They do offer things like limited deals called lightning deals. And these may only be available for a certain time of the day or tomorrow. Limited time you need to check their today deals or prime day page to see what these options are. And if you add it to your cart and it's not a, you can join the wait list that just means another customer has it in their cart. They don't buy it. You can grab that deal. I know you mentioned Andre some of the biggest brands out there. Pale on Barbie Dyson. That'll have items for sale in this particular prime day when it comes to the best deals. What do you think are the best ones out there right now? And this is no different than previous prime day events. The best deals are gonna be on Amazon owned products. So I think Echo Show devices, Amazon fire TV, STV sticks, fire cubes, kindle readers. Amazon Fire Kids tablet. They're offering so many sales. I I mentioned some of those 50% off the Amazon Fire Kids tablet, 67% off the echo dot um bundle with a smart plug. So lots of savings to have. They also have something called your invite only deals. This is a limited selection of savings. Um They only have a certain number of them, but those are gonna be your biggest discount. So looking at 56 sent off the Phillips Se uh 3000 series air Fryer 50% off and I robot Roomba robot vacuum. So the bigger discounts are going to be on those limited options. But if it's something you need, I would definitely apply for that invite only and of course, they're not the only ones offering sales. Yes. How do you know that you're getting a good deal. So that's the biggest question. A lot of people wanna know, why should I shop early? Should I wait for Black Friday? How do I know? There's some great tools to make? Help you make a good purchase decision. First use price tracking tools like Camel camel camel dot com. They also have a browser extension called the Camel Lier. This offers historical pricing data. So especially specifically for Amazon products. This will tell you if the deal you're looking at today and tomorrow is in fact the lowest selling price. If it's not wait until Black Friday, you can also compare prices quickly using the price blink browser tool or if you happen to go in store, the shop savvy barcode scanning app. Um So these are some really great options and then if there's something that doesn't look like it's a good deal right now, use the Karma tool, you add items to the wish list, they'll alert you when it goes on sale. So this way you can snag it at a better deal before Black Friday. Good Karma. I like that. We like Good Karma here on the show, Andrea. Uh other companies I know you mentioned, obviously, it's a competitive space, other companies with good deals, which ones are they? I'm gonna just give you a highlight because literally, I think every retailer out there is offering some kind of sale right now. They know people are out there shopping because of prime, uh, Amazon prime day. So Walmart's Deals, holiday kickoff launched yesterday that goes through the 12th. Best Buy is hosting a 48 hour flash sale the same day today. And tomorrow they have exclusive sales and they have a member deal where if you spend 500 you're gonna get a $500 reward certificate to use on Best Buy purchases in Dec. So that could help you out later in the season. Cole's Deal dash runs from October 9th to the 11th. Sam's Club has an event. Macy's is hosting a fab Fall event. JC Penney has an event. I mean, the list goes on and on a benefit of shopping. These, these competitor sales is obviously there could be cheaper deals maybe on a competitor brand compared to Amazon's own brand. Plus some of these sites offer coupon codes that you can stack on top of the sale to save more and you can even earn cash back, use a deal site like coupon cabin dot com. They're offering 9% back at bjs which was hosting an event as well. 2% back at Coles, 5% back at Macy's 3% back at JC Penney. They have lots of coupons as well. So as you can see, you might be able to save more by racking up that cash back at these competitors. All right. And just a short bit of time left here. Any other tips for viewers as they prepare for their holiday shopping. Yeah, so I mentioned making that game plan. You don't want to go into the sale without a plan because that's when people get into trouble. There's so many sales. You start adding items to your cart you don't need and you'll buy things you don't need and overspend. So stay on budget by creating your list. Use the Santa's Bag app. This allows you to add each person a gift idea and how much you've spent per person to keep you on budget. And then my final tip turn these purchases that you're making now into free money to use later in the season. I love the fetch out, take pictures of all your, I got to jump in where I don't time we know that. Thank you for the tips.