It's Almost Black Friday: Get a Peek Inside Our Rigorous Process of Deal-Finding
The Good Housekeeping Institute has been testing products since 1900 — that's six years before the FDA was founded and 14 years before the FTC. (We've been ahead of the curve for a long time.)
As for me, I've been at the helm of GH's deal-finding and shopping strategy for nearly six years, and have been reporting on sale events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Amazon Prime Day(s) since 2017. I have personally sifted through millions of deals — and that is no exaggeration. Our team receives a spreadsheet of projected discounts of around 300,000 deals per savings event, so that's over 1.2 million deals scanned in a single year. You do the math!
The GH team has a dynamic handle on the trendiest, buzziest products that actually work and the time-tested items that stand up to years of repeated use. We also take pride in debunking commonly held beliefs in the name of consumer protection.
To deliver the best deals on GH picks to our readers, our expert deal-hunters team up with the product-testing experts that run the Labs at the Good Housekeeping Institute. Together, we find deals that sit at the intersection of quality and value. We believe that there are only good deals to be found on good products, so any item that earns a spot in our deal recommendations must first go through a rigorous gamut. Here's how we do what we do.
We consider the quality and timing of the deal.
Cherry-picking only from our pool of trusted products, our deal-finding experts then get to work analyzing the quality of each deal to see if it’s actually worth shopping now. We use price tracking data tools to look at each item's price history to see if it's the cheapest it’s ever been, or if it has a tendency to go on steeper sale at another time of year — and if so, we'll tell you when and if you're better off waiting! (For example, we think you should wait and try to buy a mattress around major holiday weekends, if you can).
We aim for complete transparency in sale history: If we see that something was marked up only to be marked down, or if it's "always" on sale (which means it’s actually never on sale), it most likely will not earn a spot on our list. To do this, we use a combination of proprietary tools and historical knowledge, as well as third-party tools like CamelCamelCamel, an Amazon price tracking site and browser extension called The Camelizer. It's free to anyone and gives an at-a-glance, all-time price history chart for nearly any product sold on Amazon and enables you to create alerts for price drops and discounts on Amazon products.
We also consider if each item's savings are substantial — we tend to prioritize deals over 30% off, but if the savings are rare (say, the brand hardly ever marks down its products, like Apple, which tends to only host one major, direct-to-consumer savings event a year on Black Friday, or Nordstrom, which has its Anniversary Sale every summer), then we may OK featuring a lower discount on an item that's only seldom marked down. We also secure exclusive-to-GH deals from brands we know, love and trust, and believe you will too.
We bring you deals on the items you actually want to buy.
We are a data-driven team focused on providing you, our readers, with the most relevant, valuable information that’s truly worth your time and money. Every day, we're doing live research to monitor what people are clicking on, engaging with and purchasing from our links in order to curate our content to best reflect your interests and needs.
We do this by continuously analyzing trends to identify what's popular, what’s going viral on social media, what’s always sold out or has a six-figure waiting list and which products have hundreds of thousands of five-star reviews from satisfied customers. Then, we do the work to determine what’s truly worth the hype. Ultimately, you can count on us to only highlight deals that the GH fam cares about, from kitchen essentials to cozy clothing and comfortable footwear to trusted beauty, top-performing cleaning appliances, beloved toys and beyond.
We highlight top-tested, expert-loved brands and items.
Good Housekeeping is founded on a bedrock of trust largely earned from our independent and unbiased product testing — and we lean heavily on those results when choosing what deals to feature. We cross-check trends with our own proprietary product testing data gleaned from decades of Lab-led tests, and prioritize featuring the items and brands that have performed well. We also lean on our editors’ expertise, since they know the latest and greatest in gifting, trends and decor.
In other words, you won’t find just any old discounts in our recommendations, nor will you see a list that simply repeats a brand’s own highlight reel of featured deals — a GH deal has to be on a product someone on our staff trusts and loves. If we're recommending it, someone in our office has gotten hands-on with it. We won't feature something we can't speak for or wouldn't recommend to our own friends and family.
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