Shoppers Look to Score More Deals on Cyber Monday

iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — After a record-breaking Black Friday, shoppers are gearing up for Cyber Monday.

More than 122 million Americans are expected to shop online on Cyber Monday to score even more discounts, according to the National Retail Federation.

“Millions of consumers shopped over Thanksgiving weekend and reserved a portion of their budgets exclusively for Cyber Monday, knowing that there will be digital deals that are too good to pass up,” the retail federation’s president and CEO, Matthew Shay, said in a statement.

Online sales on Black Friday broke records, topping $3 billion, bringing the total sales for the day up to more than $5 billion. All told, 154 million consumers shopped over Thanksgiving weekend, up from 151 million last year, a survey by the retail federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics found.

For Cyber Monday, retailers are offering deals on electronics, appliances and clothes, with big box retailers like Target, Walmart and Amazon all competing for customers. Target.com is offering 15 percent off items across its website.

Cyber Monday online shoppers should still shop smart, compare prices and check for price reductions after a purchase to help increase the savings, ABC News’ Becky Worley advises.

Compare Prices: Use an online tool like the Google shopping tab when searching for products. It shows real-time prices at online retailers around the web. In physical stores, use bar code scanning apps like Red Laser. You can either purchase from lower-priced sites or use the data to get store mangers to price-match.

Compare Historical Prices: There is some indication that prices can be elevated before big shopping weekends. Use camelcamelcamel.com to see a product’s price history over the last year. If the price is higher than at previous times of the year, it might not be as good a deal as you think.

Use Slice to monitor price drops after your purchase: Slice is an app and web service that combs through personal emails to find receipts from online purchases. Once it finds a purchase, Slice tracks when the product ships as well as tracks the price of the item. If there is a price drop after the item was originally purchased, Slice sends an alert to help get a refund from the retailer for the difference in price.

Shop the Right categories:
Cyber Monday boasts some serious deals on an array of products, but the following promise to be especially good deals.

Electronics

  •     Android phones
  •     External hard drives
  •     HDMI cables and other small electronic parts
  •     Laptops
  •     Cameras
  •     Headphones
  •     Other gadgets made by Amazon

Home Essentials

  •     Target.com 15 percent off sitewide

Clothes

  •     Many clothing stores blanket-discount their entire inventory.

Shoes

  •     6PM.com Cyber Monday shoe sale
  •     Department stores

Beauty

  •     Gift bundles at department stores
  •     Extra sample products at beauty chains — Sephora, Ulta
  •     Bath and Body Works — buy one, get one deals

Cyber Monday Shopping Pro Tip: Clear Browser History to Keep Prices Lower

When cookies track online browser data, retailers can use that as a tool to see if a consumer has come back to the website multiple times to look at an item, similar to how ads pop up on various sites based on previous search sessions.

Items customers viewed are then priced accordingly based on that data. A price is set at a level which the customer’s history shows they would presumably spend. This is called dynamic pricing and can change person to person, minute by minute.

This makes it especially important for online shoppers to delete any browsing history before heading back to a website to make a final purchase.

Want to clear your browser’s history from the beginning of time? Here’s how.

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