By Khaled Assem & Heidi Soliman

We witness the most important day of sales and discounts around the world in the end of November. Black Friday is the day online shoppers most look forward to. As consumers, we take  this great opportunity to look for incredible offers and buy the best products we can find. So, if your plan is to buy a new smartphone, laptop, camera, item of clothes or anything else on Black Friday, it’s better to be prepared than sorry or you might miss a great offer. The outlet you are buying from can offer discounts for a day or even a month. Either way you need to be prepared and ready with all the information related to Black Friday. Don’t miss out on great offers and read our review.  

Yaoota always has its readers best interests, and it’s giving you the ultimate guide to Black Friday. You will know how to find the best deals, discounts, sales and offers. Through Yaoota you will find a link specialized for discounts with all the deals. You could easily find the discount percentage on every product. Not only that but you can compare prices and find the best outlets you want to buy from. Then you can simply place your order online and have it delivered to your doorstep.

Let’s begin with some basic information related to the biggest day of sales and discounts known as Black Friday.  

What is Black Friday? When did it start? What’s its story?

Most of us know this day as the day of great discounts and sales. It’s the day when consumers find the best deals ever one year after another. Black Friday began in the United States and then started spreading to other countries around the world. This day comes on the last Friday of November, which marks the day after Thanksgiving (a popular holiday in the United State).

Black Friday dates back to 1869, during that time the United States was facing a huge financial crisis. And corruption erupted remarkably in the country due to the bad economical state. Consumers stopped buying and outlets stopped selling. The U.S. market became still. The government then had to find a solution to this crisis and forced companies to offer discounted prices in an effort to make consumers buy the enormous number of unsold products on sellers shelves. This plan of the U.S. government worked and consumers started buying again. From then Black Friday became a notable day in the U.S., and was known as the day stores and outlets offer great discounts on products as well as services.

Curious to know why it’s called Black Friday?  

Some opinions point to the direction that this day was named Black Friday because of the financial crisis that the United States was facing at the time. Other theories say that in the year 1960 a company called ‘Philadelphia’ referred to the day as Black Friday due to the large number of people who stormed to stores, which resulted in causing problems and traffic cognitions. And also caused a crisis for police officers due to the huge amount of people who rushed to stores to buy discounted items.  

In the Arab world, there has been many names given to this day, for instance Souq.com calls it ‘White Friday’ for different reasons that we don’t need to get into. It started on the website as a one-day sale and expanded to a whole month for Jumia.com last year.            

When is Black Friday?

Black Friday this year is coming on the 23rd of November, some online stores will have a one-day sale and others will have it for a few days, while some have it through out the month.

Important tips and advice for Black Friday

• A really important point is to first figure out whether you actually want to buy something in general or not. And whether or not this product is really important for you to wait till Black Friday, to buy it.
• The biggest mistake you can ever make is to buy a product for the sake of buying and not because you actually need it, buying a product you don’t really need means that you will take the opportunity from someone who needs this product more than you do and end up spending money one something you don’t need.
• Black Friday on websites like Jumia.com and Souq.com takes more than one day and these websites announce their plans for Black Friday before it by enough time for you. So you are able to look for products that interest you. Yaoota will inform you with every sites’ plan as soon as they announce the plan officially.
• Be specific with products you would like to buy on that day, and study well which websites will have offers and when. For the sake of being prepared to find the best offers and discounts.
• Friday is the grand day on most websites and if you are really looking to buy a certain product then you need to devote some time to regularly checking the site for products you want to buy. Also, you need to get up early that day to be able to catch the latest offers before they are gone.
• Many products are limited in quantities, which mean first come first serve, so you need to act fast in order to find the product you are looking for and to be the first person who buys it before it goes out of stock.
• Be aware of something called ‘flash sale’ that many websites do during Black Friday period, like the name they are huge sales that stores provide for limited time and limited quantities. Products in the flash sale get sold quickly. This means you need to have the website open in front of you at all time or download the app on your smartphone so that whenever there’s a new flash sale you’d be prepared. The flash sale is mostly on mobile phones and laptops which is considered an advantage. On Yaoota you will find a page that shows you all the exact discounts from all the stores available.
• The biggest sales and discounts are on clothes, small appliances, tools and house appliances. In addition, mobile phones, laptops, TVs, etc. have great discounts during the period of Black Friday.
• Days before Black Friday, it’s best if you go online on different online stores and discover the prices of the items you want to buy. On Black Friday go on the websites again and check how much were the prices reduced. That way you can make your decision on whether or not it would be worth it to buy the item after Black Friday’s discount.
• Many stores and online shops raise the prices of products before Black Friday, so they place discounts that are not true. You can avoid falling for this by going on Yaoota to compare prices before and during the Black Friday. Just to be sure products are actually on sale and not on a made-up sale. There’s a page on Yaoota that gives you all the offers with the exact discount percentage from all the stores all showing on the same page.      
• Never buy an item without a receipt whether from a store or online, so that if there’s anything wrong with the product you can return or exchange it.
• Unfortunately, there are many stores that sell fake items as real brands. Black Friday is an opportunity for stores to get rid of fake items. That’s why as a consumer you have to be very careful to buy the real brand whether you are buying sports shoes, laptops, mobile phones or anything else.  There are many ways to check whether the product is real or fake, in the case of shoes, clothes or watches for instance you have to make sure that the model being sold is actually available from this specific brand. As in some cases items can carry big brand names without actually ever existing from brands in the first place. You need to compare the real price of the product from a reliable outlet and the price after the sale. However, for electronic devices most items give you the ability to check whether the item is fake or real from the serial number. You simply enter it on the website of the product and check if it’s real or not. And there’s also a safer way to check the product’s authenticity and we will discuss it in the next point.
• Popular stores themselves offer large sales and discounts on that day. It’s best to buy from these famous stores to avoid buying fake products. If you are going to buy a product online from Souq.com or Jumia.com, make sure that you buy from a trusted market place that you have previously bought from and are guaranteed. Also, if the products or outlets have been highly rated then they are probably trusted.
• Try not to pay by credit cards, choose cash on delivery as your payment option. Because on that day there’s a possible chance the purchasing process can go wrong, for instance it’s possible for the product to take a long time to get delivered or it could arrive with defaults or you can experience any other issue. Your credit card would get charged and it might be a hassle to get your money back and could take a very long time. With cash on delivery you have the ability to check the item before you pay for it.
• Always check with the consumer protection authority, they issue many reports related to Black Friday. Also, you can refer to them in case you face any problems with any store or online shop.
• Many people prefer to buy from international websites on that day, if you decide to do so, make sure you pick trusted websites like Amazon & Ebay. And if possible try to send your order to someone you know who lives in the United States to check your order if it has any defaults. And the other option if you don’t know anyone residing in the United States is to use one of those websites that deliver orders from the United States to Egypt to make the delivery process easier.
• Lately, Yaoota has came up with a new feature that shows you when there’s a discount on an item available online. However, we have noticed that many times websites don’t apply the same discount rate we apply (we display the latest fixed discount recorded, and we always make sure that we are constantly updating prices). On Yaoota we show the old (recorded) price and the new price. Then we calculate the actual discounted percentage.

Check out all the deals, discount and offers from Yaoota’s deals page here. 

*Some products may be currently out of stock, but they will be available again soon. If you encounter any similar problem, please comment on the article, or contact us through our Facebook page.