Price trackers and other tools to find deals this Black Friday

Black Friday (November 25, 2022) and Cyber Monday (November 28, 2022) are almost here! We’ve assembled a guide with the best online tools for you to get the most out of your online shopping experience. While these dates fall at the end November, retailers usually begin offering deals as early as late October.

Whether you’re shopping online or in-store this year, make sure to stay safe during this holiday season. 

Happy shopping!

Use a VPN

First up, use a VPN! 

A VPN, or virtual private network, essentially functions as a secure tunnel between your device and the internet—protecting your personal information from being exposed. This includes sensitive data such as your payment details, account information, location, and shopping habits.

When shopping online, take care to avoid using free VPNs, as you can leave yourself open to subpar security, limited server choices, reduced speeds, and no support.

As it turns out, prices for flights, hotel packages, games, and media can vary across geographical regions. Using a VPN while shopping online can help you change your IP address to virtually any country if servers are available. From that vantage point, you can get the best prices and deals without breaking the bank. 

Already have an ExpressVPN subscription? Find out how to protect even more of your devices now for peace of mind during this shopping season. 

Look out for HTTPS 

One of the most important things when shopping online during this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales is making sure that your retailers of choice have SSL encryption on their websites. Essentially this means that all traffic that runs through a site during your session is extremely secure. Here’s how you can tell if a site is safe to use:

• The website address will begin with https rather than http; and
• The presence of a padlock icon to the left of the URL in the browser’s address bar

Google Chrome—and Chromium-based browsers in general—will provide a notification that a website is not secure. Firefox will display a padlock with a red line through it to denote an unsecured connection.

It’s important to note that https encryption works whether or not you’re connected to the VPN. But, a VPN and https encryption paired together will keep you highly secure.

Extensions

A quick disclaimer before getting into our list of helpful online shopping extensions. 

The only way to be 100% safe while shopping this holiday season is to not shop online at all—but we know that’s not realistic! 

Having said that, the extensions in this guide are able to provide the insights that they do via the gathering of user data. While this isn’t ideal, there is a trade-off for being able to access information on the latest deals. In other words, if you want deals, you need to be aware of the potential risks involved.

Here are some quick steps for mitigating these risks:

1. Use a VPN whenever you’re online
2. Install an adblocker on your browser. We’d recommend uBlock Origin on Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Opera
3. Use a custom email address for online shopping to keep your online shopping accounts separate from your primary email. 

Coupons and cashback offers

Who doesn’t like discounts? Nobody! Here is a selection of free browser extensions that will save you some big bucks. All extensions listed below are available on Chrome (and Chromium-based browsers like Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, etc.) and Firefox, and can be used in tandem:

Capital One Shopping

Capital One Shopping automatically applies coupon codes to your shopping carts for over 30,000 popular retailers including H&M, Groupon, Apple, Samsung, Priceline, and Microsoft. All supported stores are listed here. You can also earn rewards that can be redeemed for gift cards.

Get it for Chrome: here

Get it for Firefox: here

Rakuten

In addition to their awesome streaming service, Rakuten also has great coupon and cashback offers from 3,500+ top retailers. Popular deals include offers from eBay, Walmart, Adidas, Nike, Apple, and more.

Get it for Chrome: here

Get it for Firefox: here

Price tracking tools

Price tracking tools are a great way to simplify your online shopping experience by collecting prices for items you’re looking for in a single place. For products you’re interested in purchasing, you can either compare prices across multiple retailers, or track their pricing history. 

Amazon Assistant

Amazon Assistant is an official Amazon browser extension that helps you view historical prices on Amazon products in addition to comparing prices for the same products while on other websites. Amazon Assistant is compatible with a variety of international Amazon stores including the U.S., the UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Japan, India, and Australia.

Get it for Chrome: here

Get it for Firefox: here

Keepa

One of the most-used Amazon price trackers, Keepa provides detailed price history charts for over 2 billion Amazon products. Keepa also provides information on daily deals, live price drops, and functionality to import your Amazon wishlist. Keepa covers all major international Amazon stores and offers full language support. 

Get it for Chrome: here

Get it for Firefox: here

The Camelizer

The Camelizer, offered by CamelCamelCamel, provides historical pricing and ranking data, and up-to-date information on price drops for over 18 million Amazon products. 

Get it for Chrome: here

CNET Shopping

Formerly known as InvisibleHand, CNET Shopping sources pricing information from a variety of sources then presents you with the lowest prices on everything from online shopping to hotel bookings and flights. Retailers across the U.S., the UK, and Germany are currently supported.

Get it for Chrome: here

Get it for Firefox: here

Review checking tools

Have you ever wondered if a review you’ve read for a product seems a little…off? Well, wonder no longer! Review checkers are a great way to determine which reviews are authentic, and which are most likely written by a bot. Keep in mind that these services aren’t meant as a replacement for reading reviews yourself, but rather an additional dimension to consider when doing product research.

Fakespot

Covering popular online retailers like Amazon, eBay, Best Buy, Shopify, and Walmart, Fakespot provides valuable insights into product review authenticity, trustworthiness of third party sellers, and curated selections from heavily rated reviews.

Get it for Chrome: here

ReviewMeta

ReviewMeta provides analyses into millions of Amazon products across all major international Amazon stores and helps to filter out reviews that are deemed biased or fake.

Get it for Chrome: here

Get it for Firefox: here

Get it for Edge: here

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Read more: 9 tips for safer online shopping