Cyber Monday Archive

Most times deals are discussed as they launch or briefly before launch. On November 20th, an upcoming offer began to circulate that, from what I can tell, has generated the most discussion pre-launch of any deal since Al Gore invented the Internet. What makes this deal discussion even more odd, is that most of the specifics related to the deal haven’t even been shared as of yet.

UPDATE: DEAL IS NOW DEAD – Link removed for clarity. Looks like they sold about 100k or so max.

All we know at this point is that Google Offers will run a deal with Newegg for $20 for $40 at some point. We don’t know specifically when they deal will launch, how long it will be available for, how many deals will be offered, what the restrictions are, etc. Yet even knowing so little about the deal, it is discussed like people won’t be sleeping until the deal comes alive.

Here’s what we do know based on chatter and the promotion pages on both the Google Offers and Newegg websites (displayed below). The deal will be for $40 worth of Newegg credit for $20. I have to assume that Google will be strong on enforcing limits unlike early national deals on Groupon and Living Social. Since the promotion of this deal started over a week ago, I am going to guess that this deal will be available on Cyber Monday. I don’t have any confirmation of this but it just seems like the perfect time to run the deal and I can’t see Google wanting to pimp an upcoming deal forever. On the flip side, this upcoming deal has probably helped Google get a ton of new opt-in Google Offers members.

UPDATE: This deal will go live at 9am Pacific (Noon Eastern) so be ready!

If the deal does go live tomorrow, I think it would be comparable to the Old Navy deal that Groupon ran this weekend and should beat out the Office Max deal that Living Social ran. I am still looking forward to seeing if any of the 3 deal sites offer something better than their sub-par Black Friday offerings.

I will update this post once the deal goes live – everyone that has discussed the deal believes it will be short lived so you will need to be quick. My suggestion is to make sure your Google account is hooked into Google Offers and you test out the ordering process so you know where to click and don’t have to read a lot of text as you place the order.

Today is Cyber Monday here in the U.S. This is the day when online retailers and merchants offer extra-special deals for their online customers. In the past today has been a great day to shop online although this year the deals were hot on Black Friday so I am not sure that the deals will be as hot this year as they have been for past year’s Cyber Monday sales.

One method I use to save additional money is to buy discounted gift cards. My favorite deal this Cyber Monday (actually it runs until December 5th) is from HEB supermarkets. They are running a promotion which provides the following discounts for purchasing gift cards at their stores:

• $5 off $50
• $15 off $100
• $50 off $300

Last night I purchased $300 in Southwest gift cards and saved $50 on my next flight. I also purchased a $100 Amazon gift card for $85– it’s so rare to save extra dollars on top of Amazon’s deals so this is hot. HEB supermarkets are found mostly in the south. They have gift cards from over 200 retailers and I think the best deals for gadgets and apps are the gift cards from iTunes, Best Buy and Amazon.

It appears many merchants are offering discounted iTunes gift cards so be on the lookout if you are planning to buy any music or apps for your iPod Touch, iPad or iPhone.

There are other gift card deals out there so before you click “buy now” on any items today and for the holiday season, do a search to see if there are any deals that can save you additional money by finding a deal on a gift card for the specific merchant.

Continue reading “Cyber Monday – Use Gift Card Deals to Maximize Savings” »

Update October 20, 2010 – Postabon has changed their name to Signpost.

What’s a deal hunter to do now that Cyber Monday and Black Friday are over? A new NYC startup launching today hopes they have the answer. We also know that “location” is hot. Postabon combines these concepts together to create a crowd-sourced, location-based deal finder.

The Postabon website displays deals based on the location  you select. Currently the company notes that most of the deals are located in NYC. Within the Postabon system, deals are called “bons” and are crowd-sourced which means that users post the deals they find.

Bons are categorized into five categories: eat, shop, entertainment, misc., and other. Each time a user posts a deal/bon, they receive “karma points” and naturally there’s a leaderboard. I wonder if they will create badges which seem to be the hot trend lately.

The real power of Postabon is in their mobile application. It allows you to submit Bons you find around town. In additiona, the Postabon iPhone application can show you deals based on your GPS location.

There’s a discussion of the technology behind Postabon on Hacker News.

As long as Postabon can get users to post a good number of deals in both categories and variety of type, the service could do very well. I assume eventually Postabon will partner with one of the other location-based services (i.e. Brightkite).

Tomorrow in the U.S. is the special online-only holiday of Cyber Monday. I just left my finger workout class at the local gym to get ready for all of the exciting and quick moving deals that will be available. If you are new to Cyber Monday or are looking for information on how to find the best deals, I’ve shared a bunch of tips and techniques on my InformationWeek column.

Some online retailers have started their Cyber Monday sales early so if you are waiting until tomorrow to start searching, you might try searching tonight.

On Friday we reported that office supply retailer Staples was having issues with their website and ordering during their Black Friday sales. Today’s issue is even more fun than if the Staples website was down.

Staples posted their Cyber Monday deals a day early — one of the deals is for $25 in free Sharpie markers and pens. The purchase should be simple…add $25 in Sharpie products to your shopping cart, apply the coupon code 96140 and bingo — $25 in free Sharpie products. The deal was to begin at 6am this morning. The deal hunters lined up in massive lines with their products chosen just waiting for 6am. When 6am came, the code was not working. In fact, as of 5pm Eastern, the code is still not working.

The coupon issue sent the deal forums into mass panic. SlickDeals shows over 115 pages of replies related to this deal and over 155k topic views. Other deal forums show hundreds of reviews and tens of thousands of pageviews. So while Staples gets some egg on their face, the deal forums make out well in ad views. I guess we can say that for today, Staples was the Digg for the deal forums.

Big kudos to the customer service team at Staples – so far I haven’t read one complaint with how the coupon issue was handled. I sure hope that Staples management provides a bonus for the entire call center. At one point there were over 2,000 people on hold. The greeting on the phone line tells customers to call back later if they are looking for the Sharpies coupon and it will be validated later in the week.

Many of us are wondering why they didn’t just fix the coupon code so it worked. I grabbed a bunch of markers and pens – I wonder how long they last before they dry out.