As the shopping season gears up, we’re being flooded with “deals” — particularly for ‘Black Friday.’ While there are a few killer deals for consumer electronics products there are a lot more not-so-great deals. Buyer beware!
A couple of hot deals that will require shoppers to camp out all night and then sprint down the aisles are the Tom-Tom XL340S, a very capable GPS that once sold for $250, on sale at Target for $97 this Black Friday and the Acer Aspire One netbook for $150 at OfficeMax.
Too Many Mediocre Deals – Retrevo’s analysis shows that a large number of deals are for obscure products with little review information available and many products, according to Retrevo’s life-cycle analysis are entering their golden years. Not only are many Black Friday products showing their age, the deals aren’t even that great with the average discount of around 20% off Retrevo s fair price.
Big Lists. No Analysis. – Most of the Black Friday sites likeblackfriday.info, theblackfriday, and tgiblackfriday pride themselves on offering exhaustive lists of deals but what’s missing on these sites is any kind of analysis to inform consumers which deals are worth the trouble.
Deals May Not Be As They Appear – Black Friday bloggers and forums have been buzzing about a $78 Blu-ray player from Magnavox. Admittedly a $78 Blu-ray player in the world of $150 $250 Blu-ray player sounds like an exceptionally good deal but word on the street says this is an old Profile 1.1 player that doesn’t support the latest 2.0 (BD-Live) standard. We say rather than risk bodily harm on Black Friday to buy one of these, why not spend a few dollars more and get a more up-to-date model?
More Duds Than Deals – We could point to many more deals like the Garmin nuvi 205 for $89 which was a good product in its day and the HP OfficeJet J4680 All-In-One-Printer on sale at Staples for $64.98 that gets a caution on Retrevo and 2.4 out of 5 on Amazon, and many more just like these. We wonder why wouldn’t you want to add what you’d spend for a dinner for two and get a newer, better GPS or printer and not end up being penny wise and pound foolish.
Retrevo’s Real Time Review to the Rescue – There are few sites we have to give credit to like i4u and bfads that have some deal analysis on a handful of products but why not get the full treatment from Retrevo.com that uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and other state-or-the-art computer science technology to provide real-time analysis of consumer electronics products including Black Friday deals. You can quickly check out a deal that looks interesting and see if it’s a true deal or just a dud. Try it yourself at Retrevo’s Black Friday Real-Time Resource Center.
By Andrew Eisner
Director of Content, Retrevo
Retrevo is the consumer electronics shopping site visited by over four million people every month. Retrevo uses Artificial Intelligence technology to make sense of the consumer electronics market and help electronics shoppers decide what to buy, when to buy, and where to buy it. Whether it’s HDTVs, camcorders, laptops, or cameras, Retrevo gives shoppers the information they need to make confident purchases. Retrevo is a Silicon Valley based company that has been virtually matching people and consumer electronics since 2006, and has recently been featured in SmartMoney, The Motley Fool, MacWorld, PC World, Fox Business, The UK Register, and more.
