Every year, whenever people are eyeing up a major purchase or upgrade, they’ll pad their savings account until winter rolls around. Winter has become the sales season, with November through to January being the platform for many of the year’s most advertised and highly-anticipated offers.
It’s a crazy frenzy that’s centric to a national holiday in the United States, an originally Christian holiday, and the start of the new Gregorian calendar. While many of the sales of this huge shopping window are coming to a close, many industries layout promotions throughout the year – you just have to know where to look for them.
Finding the best deals from November to January
While the adoption of Black Friday in the UK was quite recent and only really became a fully-fledged event in the last few years, it is now utilised as a sales day by many of the biggest brands that offer their wares to the country. So, in preparation for catching some bargains, people in the UK, around October time, find themselves searching Google to find out when Thanksgiving is and when Black Friday will start – it’ll be on 27 November in 2020.
Amazon puts on a big sales event each winter, encouraging people to explore the website with this advertisement.
Black Friday 2019 featured deals such as a 75’’ 4K Philips TV reduced from £1499 to £899 at Currys, Apple MacBook Pro cut to £2179 from £2399 with BT, and an Xbox One X Forza Horizon 4 and Lego Speed Bundle only costing £299 instead of the £440 tag price at John Lewis. The main theme tends to be tech, but many retailers spread into other regions, as Amazon does with their Black Friday events.
If Black Friday wasn’t difficult enough to navigate, Cyber Monday kicks off on the Monday after Black Friday – 30 November in 2020. Cyber Monday is now effectively just an extension of Black Friday, with a focus on eCommerce sales. Some of the top offers on in 2019 included a £22 Amazon Echo Dot from Amazon and Apple AirPods with Wireless Charging Case from £139 from Argos.
There’s no rest from the sales, though, with some retailers putting on promotions and offers in the running to Christmas to get some late sales on the books.
After the respite of Christmas Day, the sales rush gets underway again on Boxing Day. This is closely followed by the January sales event, which is the traditional sales window in the UK, with some of the promotions combining them together with the Boxing Day sales. This year, big discount events like up to 70 per cent off at H&M and the Superdrug up to 50 per cent off sale were among the headline acts.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a leading retailer without a selection of big money-off deals during these now-staple sales windows, which can make it difficult for people to find the best deals on the day. There’s also the problem that many people simply don’t know until the day what will go on offer, so they don’t really know how much money they need to save. This is amplified by many retailers keeping their on-sale stock secret until the day to drive traffic.
Sales window closing, but there are plenty of offers to claim
Supermarkets are continually changing their offers and putting items on sale.
For big-name retailers, participation in the various winter sales has become more of a practice spawned from conformity than anything else, and for most, it’ll be their main sales event of the year. However, other big-name shopping brands are more than happy to stage their own sales events at other stages of the year.
Each year, at the exact opposite end of the year to that of Black Friday and the January sales, Amazon stages a massive sales event called Prime Day. It started on 15 July last year and will take place from 13-14 July in 2020. As if Amazon Prime customers didn’t get enough with the same-day conveyance, music platform, and video platform, Prime customers also get an exclusive sales event in the middle of the summer.
Outside of major sales events put on by some retailers, in other industries, sales and promotions have become such an ongoing feature that many people forget that they’re continually in the works. The most glaring example is in the iGaming industry.
As the scene is so incredibly competitive, brands need to find ways to stand out, with the promotions and offers pages being the primary battlegrounds in iGaming. You’ll see everywhere that online bingo brands will offer welcome bonuses and specialised sections for newcomers, otherwise known as ‘Newbies Rooms,’ but some go further to continually offer ongoing bingo promotions to existing players after they claim the welcome bonuses, such as mystery jackpots, reward tokens, free games, and Birthday bonuses.
Another obvious industry where offers are on the go at all times is in the supermarket industry. Due to the rise in prevalence of price comparison websites, big supermarket chains have almost been forced to battle it out on the offers front with their big-brand items. The practice has become so engulfing, in fact, that even the most premier of high-end food retail, Marks & Spencer, has launched a new line of value offers.
The future of deals and promotions
While a huge number of major outlets putting out offers at set times of the year can’t be a bad thing, it is very difficult to navigate the sales and work out the best offers. Some people even get so wrapped up in the events that they just end up buying things that they don’t really want or need.
The future of such events is in software which can not only streamline the process of finding the best offer during sales events but also throughout the year. This is why the browser extension Honey looks to be such an exciting prospect for online shoppers.
Honey has been reviewed quite well but does have its flaws. Its strengths are in its ability to search databases for coupons and purchase drops automatically, but it has also been noted that it doesn’t always find coupons. There’s also the additional flaw that Honey doesn’t have an app and is only for computer shopping.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jjZWJqUcLc&feature=emb_logo
Honey claims to help people to find the lowest price when shopping online.
Anything that can help co-ordinate shoppers during clustered sales periods and direct them to the very best offers has to be the future of deals and promotions. This sector would also possibly help to reduce prices further due to outlets competing to be at the top of one comprehensive list per item.
While many people have become accustomed to saving for the winter sales window, others understand that there are plenty of promotions and offers to be found every day.
