If your entire Black Friday strategy involves stopping by the mall on the day after Thanksgiving, you might want to check out Retrevo’s guide to Black Friday buying. Not only do the Retrevo folks follow consumer electronics obsessively, they track pricing, availability and demand – you know, all the important information that’s a pain to hunt down. The guide includes top deals in different categories as well as some common sense tips for how to get what you want at the start of the holiday season while forking over the least amount of cash. One of my takeaways? Oddly, shopping at Staples looks like a really good bet for cheap CE stocking stuffers.
Not listed in the Black Friday guide, but equally important from my point of view, is Retrevo’s analysis of trends in CE pricing and demand. I discovered very recently that the site now has a feature called Retrevo Pulse, which aggregates CE buying data and shows real-time analytics. Way cool. For example, looking at recent trends for GPS units, it appears that prices have leveled off and demand is on the upswing after a four-month decline. I asked my contact at Retrevo for other recent findings, and here’s what he listed:
- Demand for TVs, digital cameras and MP3 players is turning up as we head into the holiday shopping season, but demand for cell phones is static, if not headed downward.
- Prices for digital cameras began falling in late October.
- Prices for MP3 players have been stable.
- Prices for cell phones are starting to creep up.
Talk about good intelligence for your seasonal CE shopping.
Why are prices for cell phones “creeping up” if demand is “static, if not headed downward”? That doesn’t make sense to me.
Michael Portuesi, because more and more new phones are smartphones, be it Android, Win Mobile, OSX, etc and they are accounting for much more of the market. Hence higher average prices…
Yeah, I’m seeing the same thing with some of the recent smartphone launches. Specifically a few WinMo devices and the Storm. Not sure how they can price anything above $200… without basically saying get an iPhone on AT&T instead.
Michael, Ben correctly pointed out that more people are gravitating towards smartphones with higher average selling prices pulling overall price trend up. On the other hand, HDTVs have seen prices come down more than 30% and GPS have seen prices come down ~25% through this year even though demand has been strong (volume driving prices down in this case without much affinity towards higher-end models).
Mari, thanks for the mention. We also published a “Geek Speak” guide to help everyday shoppers decipher the technical jargon that brands/retailers throw at them. This guide is also published on our main blog at http://www.retrevo.com/content/blog. Good luck this holiday season!