Miss a Cyber Monday or Black Friday deal? Don’t fret–deal season isn’t over yet

Did you make the same mistake I did?

On Black Friday and over the Thanksgiving weekend I set my site on a 10.5-inch iPad Pro with 64GB of storage. Best Buy and a couple of other retailers online listed the Apple tablet for $525, or about $125 off the regular price. I went so far as to add the iPad to an online Best Buy shopping cart.

Only I never pulled the trigger. Maybe there’d be an even better deal on Cyber Monday, I thought, or at the very least the same deal would be made available.

The strategy backfired. By Monday, Best Buy’s price was back up to $649.99, and the best online deal for the iPad Pro I came across elsewhere was $599 at New York retailer B&H Photo Video.

Now that Black Friday is in the rear-view mirror, you may be experiencing similar remorse that you didn’t buy when you had the chance. But shopping experts say that all isn’t lost. There are still deals to be had, with promotions possible not only today but all week.

That’s certainly what Amazon maintains. In a statement emailed to USA TODAY, the online retail giant said, “We have thousands of deals throughout the Turkey 5 – those five popular shopping days starting on Thanksgiving and continuing through Cyber Monday. Customers will find new deals every day, all season long. In fact, on Cyber Monday, customers will find more than 30 Deals of the Day and thousands of Lightning Deals across more than 30 categories.”

According to David Kender, senior vice president of editorial at Reviewed.com, a member of the USA TODAY Network, “from what we’re seeing, Cyber Monday has been a great day for bargain hunters so far, better than Black Friday in terms of what you can find online,”

Reviewed.com is tracking some of the best deals.

To be sure, manufacturers and retailers push certain items and product categories on or before Black Friday. They may be trying to move inventory, generate traffic (in stores or online), or lure you into a particular ecosystem—Amazon, say, for its Alexa-driven products or Google with various Google Assistant offerings. Meanwhile, consumer electronics retailers may be offering TVs at steep discounts, not necessarily to make big bucks on the TV itself, but rather to make a killing selling pricey cables or speakers.

What that all means, of course, is that by Monday, at least on some products, the retailer/manufacturer, if not the shopper, may have fulfilled the mission at hand.

But while the exact same item you want may no longer be available, at least for the price you were hoping or willing to pay for it, you may still get an excellent deal on something similar, says Matt Sargent, senior vice president with Magid, a retail consultancy.

“Over the last few years, and particularly this year, we have seen the overall cadence of deals stretching out or flattening out before the traditional start of the holiday season,” says Laura Kennedy, director of retail insights at Kantar Retail. She says some retailers start advertising Black Friday promotions as early as November 1. And she says we may see additional promotional spikes in a few weeks.

One reason, Kennedy says,  is that “the rise of online shopping has made pricing in general, whether you’re shopping in April or the middle of July, more transparent to shoppers.”

So where are the best deals right now?

Read more from USA Today here.