There’s a new deal website going up every single day these days. A good bit of them are just recycling the same information because, well, they have to all talk about the best deals. But are these websites really helpful? Should we be using them, and if so how so?
Deals deal deals
Deals are great. Who doesn’t like a good deal? But where do people go looking for these deals online? Is there one specific place you can go to just find all the best deals? Not really, but there are a couple places I would go first to start. There’s no one size fits all thing, but from my deal searching over the years I’ve found that the best deals are usually gone pretty quickly these days because usually by the time you read about the deal it’s gone. So what do you do?
A quick google search for “deals” will give you my top two places that I check for deals. My favorite being Slickdeals.net and dealnews.com is also a good site. These aren’t the only places to find deals, but what I have found is that 99% of the time you’ll find the same deals at most of the big “deals” sites or blogs. You can waste your time checking them all or you can find the one you like best and work with that one.
I do use Dealnews every now and then to check some reviews from there, but the deal site I use the most often is by far Slickdeals. I like Slickdeals because it’s more of a “real time” deals type site. That’s simply because of the way it works. Now, that’s not to say that some of the other sites won’t have some deals up quicker, that happens. But overall I feel that you’ll get the deal info the quickest if you use Slickdeals and their alerts.
Using Alerts for deals
You’ll have to head over to Slickdeals.net and make an account for yourself, which is free, and you can then sign up for alerts. What you do is put in keywords you are interested in and it will send you an email every time something goes on the site that matches what you’re looking for.
You see, Slickdeals is different from other “deal” sites and blogs in that it’s mostly a user generated forum. It’s basically a bunch of deal searchers across the country posting their found deals for people to see. One downside to this is obviously that the people have to list the deals, so you might not always get it as quickly as the the other site that they found the deal on.
However, you’ll also find special deals that only a person out looking in the world would have found. And now they are telling you all the ins and out in the forum just as if you were telling your friend over the phone.
What type of deals can you find with Slickdeals?
You can find just about any type of deal at Slickdeals. It’s really anything that people are willing to post. I will say that I don’t really use it all that much for grocery type deals, although they are found there. I use it for things like redbox codes, buying new laptops, or getting the deal from home depot type stuff.
However, that’s just a small sampling of what I’ve used it for. Just because I don’t use it for grocery shopping doesn’t mean that you can’t. In fact, there’s numerous forum post about grocery deals over there. You can find whatever you want. The key is to put in the alerts.
How do the alerts work?
Once you get in there and put in some alerts you’ll see when they start emailing you about something you were looking for. You can make the alerts broad or very specific so that you’re not wasting your time. You can also tell them to only alert you when the deal has had a certain number of ”thumbs up” which would make it more likely to be a good deal.
If you’re looking to buy anything I would highly recommend you check Slickdeals before you make your purchase. You can even look back at older posts and see what something has sold for recently, or last year even. Sometimes you might see a “deal” only to find out that it was cheaper a couple months ago. Just read through a couple forum posts and you’ll find that out pretty quickly.