Finding the Hottest Deals On The Internet

Published November 29, 2010

Find the best deals on the internet.

Where can you find the hottest deals, sales, coupons, and giveaways on the internet?

When you know what you are looking for, a “low price finder” website such as PriceGrabber.com is a little like having your very own personal shopping assistant. The site is easy to navigate and has good search options.

If you Twitter, you probably know you can search on keywords like coupon, hot buys, deals, or bargains, and find people and companies in your area “tweeting” about the best buys.

There are also sites like Groupon.com that offer terrific coupon savings on shopping in your area. Groupon negotiates big discounts on popular goods and services and then notifies its members. When enough people show an interest the deal is activated and you can sign up. Like many similar sites, Groupon offers a mobile application for iPhone and Android phones, so you can stay up to date while on the go.

One excellent and perhaps less familiar type of website is known as a deal forum website. These sites are member driven, they show the very latest and hottest deals, and they are a great way to save money on most anything you purchase.

The Best Deals on Merchandise and More

At the end of this article, I’ve listed 25 “Hot Deal” Websites you can check out, but one of my personal favorites is Slickdeals.net. Slickdeals is a deal forum website that has been around a number of years and is constantly improving. It is loaded with features, easy to navigate, and will be the main focus of this article. Every time I visit it I find an amazing deal—a real “must have”.

Slickdeals features.

The idea of the deal forum is to have a huge group of members who pass on tips to the group about any hot deals they find. Each new deal is listed in the forum as a brief text post, and other members can rate it. This rating system helps to filter out poor deals, worthless “shill posts”, and so on. The deals can then be seen in order of most recent, best rated, or most often viewed—i.e. those most interesting to people. Plus, you can also search for deals by using keywords—for example, computer deals, hot buys, etc.

Any forum can look a bit complicated at first glance, but once you try it, you’ll find it’s a snap to use. Below are just some of the many things you can do at Slickdeals.net.

1. Find the Latest Hot Deals

Go to Slickdeals.net. On the home page menu bar, select “Forums”. When the drop down menu appears, select “Hot Deals”. The Hot Deals page will then appear. (Hot Deals is also available in the “Deals” menu.) Once you’re on the Hot Deals page, look for the blue title bar that names each column on the page. It looks like this:

Below this title bar all of the hot deals are shown (after one message line from SlickDeals). For each deal, the “Thread Started” column shows the date and time it was first posted. To sort the whole list so that the newest deal shows first at the top, click on the words “Thread Started” in the title bar. Now, the column is ordered by date and time—the list starts with the most recently posted deal, and it goes backwards in time as you scan down the page. (Note: The “Last Post” column has the date and time of the most recent comment someone has made about this deal.)

To see the full description of any hot deal in the list, click on its underlined link in the first column. For example, one line might say: “Free Amazon $3 MP3 Download Credit”. If you click on this link, you will be taken to a page where you can read about this deal. If you are a member you can also rate it yourself, or comment on it. It’s easy to become a member if you like. You can go to the top of most pages on the website and click on the “Register” tab. You’ll be asked for your email address and prompted to come up with a user name and password. It’s that simple.

2. Find the Highest Rated Hot Deals

Start by going to the hot deals page (as above). Now, on the blue title bar, click the word “Rating”. This will sort all entries in the Rating column in order, with the highest rated hot deals shown first (i.e. deals with five “thumbs up”). Note that the deals are no longer listed in order of date alone, so there will be some older deals listed at the top along with more recent deals. However, only highly rated deals will be seen at the top of the list.

3. Find What Everyone is Most Interested In

Again, start by going to the hot deals page (as we did above). Now, on the blue title bar, look for the word “Views”. This column shows the number of views, or “hits” each hot deal has received. Scan down this column until you see a large number. That indicates a lot of people looked at this particular deal. You can also sort this column if you like, but again, if you do the deals will no longer be sorted in order by date.

4. Find the Lowest Price on Something You Want

First, locate the search box in the upper right hand corner of the Slickdeals homepage. Now, try typing the name of the item that interests you in the box—for example, type “computers” or maybe something more specific like “Apple iMac”. If you don’t get a hit, go to the home page and scroll all the way to the bottom. Once you’re there you’ll find a link titled “Price Compare” in the lower right-hand corner. When you click on it, you’ll go to Slickdeal’s low price finder. It is powered by Pricegrabber, which is one of the most thorough comparison shoppers on the internet. From there, you can find just about all of the best prices available.

5. Get an Email Alert Whenever a Better Deal Appears

If you are interested in a particular product, you can sign up for automatic alerts by email whenever a new hot deal on it appears on the internet. In the “Tools” menu, select “Deal Alerts”, and follow the instructions.

A deal forum such as Slickdeals is only one of many tools available for shopping on the internet, but it is an extremely powerful one that keeps you up to date on the best deals, including coupons, sweepstakes, and freebies.