Sales and when are they???

noobling4

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Sep 8, 2013
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I have been looking to buy some computer parts for a while now, but i keep getting mixed opinions about when i should buy parts.
Some people say after back to school... While others say just after BlackFriday / CyberMonday.

does anyone have any charts / stats to see how the prices fluctuate over a calender year??

Another problem that i may run into is that i live in Canada. i am not sure how that affects(effects) the cost and when sales are.
 
Solution
You can't go wrong with Black Friday, but sales are a fickle thing. I wouldn't be too concerned about timing your purchases with the 'best' sale of the year, in other words, because there's no way to know at any given time whether it's the best sale for the item(s) in which you're interested.

Hell, about a week or two after black friday, last year, I started getting emails from Microcenter about a ~$220 Core i7 3770k. That sale lasted for months; as far I know the price didn't come up at all until the Haswell release.

The bottom line with tech is that whatever you buy will almost certainly drop to a much lower price at some point after you buy it. Whether that happens a week later or a year later is basically irrelevant; you...
thank you for the tips, but what i am looking for a is the pricing trends over a calender year.

sort of like the stock markets.
i understand that prices fluctuate a lot, but does this mean that i should be following the price of an item i want for half a year?

 
You can't go wrong with Black Friday, but sales are a fickle thing. I wouldn't be too concerned about timing your purchases with the 'best' sale of the year, in other words, because there's no way to know at any given time whether it's the best sale for the item(s) in which you're interested.

Hell, about a week or two after black friday, last year, I started getting emails from Microcenter about a ~$220 Core i7 3770k. That sale lasted for months; as far I know the price didn't come up at all until the Haswell release.

The bottom line with tech is that whatever you buy will almost certainly drop to a much lower price at some point after you buy it. Whether that happens a week later or a year later is basically irrelevant; you can't worry about it. The only thing you can do is to minimize your cost at the time you wish to buy. If you wish to buy on Black Friday, then great, go for it -- but don't sit there on Black Friday wondering whether the New Year sale, or the Easter Sale, or whatever sale, will yield a better price.
 
Solution
Pricing trends on hardware are more related to new releases than calender events, for example Neweggs BF deals last year where the same as had shown up in their news letter in the months prior with very few exceptions.
 
There will be Black Friday deals, just as there are back to school deals, mid-summer deals, Labor Day deal, and so on and so forth. Nobody can tell you if the parts you are interested in buying will be on sale, so waiting until November may not help you out. PCPartPicker has some trend graphs for different hardware prices over the last 12 months, and if you wanted to look at the individual item track pricing on graphic form over a period of time for every item on the site as well.

http://pcpartpicker.com/trends/

The tabs up top let you pick different components. That data is more helpful in terms of deciding whether prices are moving up or down (RAM prices are way up across the board, for example) as opposed to timing sales, unfortunately. The most reliable way of making sure you're getting good pricing on things is to do your research, figure out what parts you want to get, and then follow a site like that day to day watching for price drops so you can take advantage of flash sales or sales on sites you dont frequent.
 
There are a few websites that track the prices of all Amazon products, and save the prices and plot them on a graph over time. Since most products are available on Amazon, this gives a good indication.

We wrote an article about this and the results were pretty impressive, some products go up + $100 end november, and then go back - $100 in February, meaning you overpay for them around Christmas. In this example it was for a Samsung TV but I'm sure this goes for all tech products.

Have a look, http://www.dealdump.com/blog/amazon-price-tracking-tools/ - CamelCamelCamel is probably your best choice.



 

thanks for the site. but i recently moved to Canada. any tips for a guy new to the the north?