A pro’s guide to holiday shopping online

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are almost here, and even now, there are already tons of deals across the online shopping sphere as we enter the holiday shopping season. We browse the internet for the best deals all the time, so if you want to know how to shop online like a pro, check out these helpful tips.

Price track to make sure you’re getting the best deal

This is a bit of an older tip, but the website Camelcamelcamel is by far the best online price tracking tool. Just take a link from Amazon (sadly, the only site it tracks), and it will show you a graph of the cost of the item over time.  You can also install a browser extension from this site that makes it easy to check and see if what you want is near its all-time low price or not.

While it doesn’t work for links from Walmart or Best Buy, you can often find the same product on Amazon and run it through Camelcamelcamel that way. It’s not perfect, but it does give you an idea of the lowest price that particular product has hit in the past.

On top of using a price tracker, you can (and should) compare prices manually. All the online retailers are competing for your dollars, so make sure whatever you’re buying, you check out a few other sites and use Google Shopping to make sure you can’t find a better price somewhere else.

This only really works for Amazon, but if you have the mobile app (iOS/Android), you can tap on the scanning icon in the search bar, and it will open up a camera interface you can use to scan barcodes and products in physical stores to compare them to the same product on Amazon instantly.

Free trials and coupons

If you haven’t already subscribed to Amazon Prime, there isn’t a better time. New signups get 30 days free, so if you sign up now, it should carry you pretty much all the way to the holidays with free shipping and might get you access to exclusive deals. However, exclusive deals usually take place during Prime Day shopping events, not Black Friday.

Make sure when you go to cancel your membership, you fully click through all the cancellation steps. There are multiple pages of the cancellation process, so don’t hit cancel and then think you’re done. Amazon really makes you work for it.

Read the fine print, warranties and return policies

Tech is sometimes unpredictable, so make sure you are aware of the return policy and warranties of the products you’re buying. For instance, whenever I buy expensive tech for over a few hundred dollars, I often try to get it from Costco since they usually have a no-questions-asked return policy for members.

Amazon generally lets people return items for up to 30 days after purchase, but not everything on the site is technically sold by the web giant, so be vigilant when buying expensive products.

Notably, if you mark the product as a gift when you buy it from Amazon, it will be easier for the recipient to return it.

You can learn more about Amazon’s return policy here.

Smartphone plans are often better in-person

While I know not everyone can make it to a decent-sized mall, in our experience, they’re the best places to get data plans and new smartphones. Since most malls pack a bunch of carrier stores in the same building, they’re forced to compete more, and often, the data plans can be $10 cheaper per month than they are online.

In addition, you’ll need to be wary of smartphone deals. While they may look like a decent discount on your phone, sometimes (especially with the Big Three carriers), the plans you need to get will be so expensive that you end up paying more for your phone + plan over two years than you would have if you bought the phone outright and gotten a cheaper plan.

Always do the math over two years to see if the carrier’s sale is better than buying the phone outright and then getting a bring-your-own-device plan (BYOD), which usually hits around $30-$40 on Black Friday for decent amounts of data. On top of this, if you buy your phone outright, you can usually keep it for 3-4 years instead of two, which will help your discount go even further and give you the option to switch between plans more often for even greater discounts.

Switch your home internet provider

Every year on Black Friday, my girlfriend and I switch whose name goes on our internet bill. This allows us to get any new sign-up discounts or bonuses. Usually, these discounts only apply for 10 months to a year, but it’s still a better deal than sticking with a carrier for years at a time.

One year, we got our 1.5Gbps plan down to $60, and another year, we paid a little bit more but also got access to free Bell TV for a year, which we never used but was a nice add-on for the night we wanted to watch the Oscars.

In that same vein, make sure you ask not to be bundled into a contract. Sometimes, the carriers will try to lock you into one by default, but usually, when I ask to not be on a contract, they just drop that wording, making it easy to cancel if a better deal comes around.

Let products sit in your cart for a few days

You’ve got to make sure the thing you want isn’t likely to sell out, but if you want to buy some clothes or other items online, sometimes, when you let the products marinate for a few days, the retailers will email you some coupons to try and entice you to check out.

However, usually you need to sign up for the retailers’ account system so they have your email on file. You can always unsubscribe after the holiday shopping season, but this part is a bit annoying.

Take advantage of temporary tax breaks

The Canadian government just announced a two-month Goods and Services Tax/Harmonized Sales Tax (GST/HST) freeze on “holiday essentials” like groceries, restaurant meals, children’s clothing and toys. The freeze starts on December 14th and will run until February 15th, 2025, so if you’re planning to buy anything covered by the freeze, it might make sense to wait until it kicks in.

You can find the full list of items impacted by the freeze here.

Shopping resources

Beyond MobileSyrup, there are lots of other sites in Canada that can help you find deals I’ve listed a few here, but let me know in the comments or on social channels (@mobilesryup pretty much everywhere) if you have any other great resources we can add.

• Red Flag Deals – great for finding deals on all kinds of goods in Canada, but I use the tech forum to find great prices on electronics.
• Flipp – This app/website lets you browse local flyers for in-store shopping.
• @Lbabinz (Twitter/Bluesky) – This social media account rounds up all of the best video game deals in Canada.
• Camelcamelcamel – I mentioned this one above, but I find it super useful year round for shopping on Amazon.

Update Nov. 21, 2024 at 1:24pm ET: Added details about the federal government’s GST/HST tax freeze.