Welcome to Black Friday 3.0: With smartphone in hand, you can stroll through a store’s aisles while browsing the deals and comparing prices at dozens of other stores.
USA Today cites stats like that 39% of shoppers ages 18 to 29 will use mobile devices to scope discounts, research products, and make purchases. What can smartphone-enabled shopping strategies do for you?
Given the pandemonium that is Black Friday, being able to use mobile devices to do price comparisons, check availability and simply browse other bargains can be invaluable. Stores offer so-called door-buster deals to lure people in, knowing they’ll buy more. Many such discounts are advertised in advance, letting shoppers do price comparisons from home PCs. But many deals aren’t promoted ahead of time, and other products that aren’t deals are strategically placed around stores. Browsing the Web from the sales floor for product and price comparisons can save time and money.
Beyond surfing the mobile sites for Toys R Us, Sears, Amazon, and other retailers, shoppers are also using smartphone apps like Mall Maps, which maps out the malls floor plan so you know where all the stores are, and coupon- and deal-finding roundup apps like DealCatcher, ShopSavvy, and TGI Black Friday, per CNNMoney. DealNews is another shopping site that rolled out a new v2 Black Friday app, which includes a feature allowing you to “club” people with your iPhone if they get in your way at the store.
Also keeping shoppers up to date with the latest deals: Twitter. Check out the Washington Post’s Black Friday Sales Twitter Aggregator for tweets from retailers like Best Buy, Kmart, Barnes & Noble, Staples, and Anthropologie.
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