Most people believe the best deals happen on Black Friday.
Our data says that's wrong.
After analyzing 48 million price observations across 6,200 Amazon products over seven years, we found that the actual best time to buy most products is the January–February window—and in many cases, simply waiting until after the holidays can save you significantly more than any Black Friday sale ever will.
Here's what the data shows.
We sampled prices on Amazon products three times daily between January 2019 and December 2025, building a continuous pricing dataset across six major product categories. Products with fewer than 90 days of pricing history were excluded. We normalized prices using an indexed baseline (average annual price = 100) to allow fair comparison across categories and price points. COVID-era outliers (March–June 2020) are noted where relevant but did not materially alter the multi-year findings.
Electronics represented the largest category by product count due to the breadth of the segment. Categories were selected to represent both high-consideration purchases (electronics, appliances) and recurring buys (beauty, tools) to ensure findings were broadly applicable.
Across all six categories and all seven years of data, prices were consistently lowest during January and February, with January sitting at a monthly price index of 94.6—meaning products in our dataset were priced, on average, 5.4% below their yearly average during January alone.
That may sound modest, but the compounding effect matters: January also had the highest frequency of new price lows—meaning not just lower averages, but more products reaching their individual lowest recorded prices than any other month.
The worst month to buy, by contrast, was October (price index: 102.4), driven by the early stages of pre-holiday price anchoring and reference price inflation ahead of Black Friday, a pattern we document in detail below. September wasn't far behind at 102.1, pushed up by new product launches in consumer electronics and back-to-school demand.
The curve above tells a consistent story across seven years: prices peak in late summer and fall, dip during Prime Day in July, then rise again heading into the holiday shopping period before declining sharply in the new year. November's apparent dip is real—Black Friday does create genuine price reductions—but it is shallower than most people expect and nowhere near the January trough.
While the January–February window held across all six categories, the magnitude and timing varied considerably. Outdoor and seasonal products showed the most dramatic swings; beauty and skincare the most stable pricing. Here's the full breakdown.
| Category | Best Month | Avg Savings | Price Index | Avoid Buying In |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Electronics | January | −5.2% | 94.8 | September |
| Toys & Collectibles | January | −7.9% | 92.1 | November |
| Outdoor & Sports | Sep–Oct | −6.6% | 93.4 | May |
| Home & Kitchen | February | −4.4% | 95.6 | Nov (pre-BF) |
| Tools & Home Improvement | Jan–Feb | −3.6% | 96.4 | April–May |
| Beauty & Skincare | February | −3.8% | 96.2 | November |
Electronics showed the largest seasonal price swings of any category. January's index of 94.8 reflects a confluence of two forces: post-holiday clearance pressure on existing stock, and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in early January, which signals new product introductions and pushes retailers to discount older models. This translates to prices averaging 5.2% below the annual baseline in January alone. October is the month to avoid, when the combination of new iPhone, MacBook, and Galaxy device launches—plus early pre-holiday price anchoring—drives the category index to its annual peak at 102.4.
No category showed sharper post-holiday deflation than toys. With a January index of 92.1—meaning prices run 7.9% below the annual average—toys exhibited the most extreme seasonal pricing cycle in our dataset. November is the mirror image, with prices peaking at approximately 108.6 (roughly 8.6% above the annual average), nearly a 16-point spread from peak to trough. This reflects pure demand dynamics: retailers overstock for the holiday season and aggressively discount in January to clear inventory. For collectibles specifically, limited restocks in Q1 also tend to coincide with seller price corrections following speculative post-launch highs.
Outdoor products are the one major exception to the January rule. The best time to buy outdoor gear, camping equipment, and sports products is actually September through October, when end-of-season clearance drives prices to their annual lows (index: 93.4, or 6.6% below the annual average). May is the month to avoid—spring demand drives prices nearly 8% above the annual average as consumers start outdoor projects and summer activities.
Home and kitchen appliances followed the broad January–February pattern, with February slightly outperforming January (index 95.6 vs. 96.8), representing a 4.4% discount versus the annual baseline at the February trough. The worst time to buy kitchen appliances is in the weeks immediately before Black Friday. October and early November are when reference prices are quietly inflated ahead of the advertised sale, a pattern we document in detail in the next section.
Tool prices track closely with home project seasonality. The January–February window offers index-level pricing of 96.4—a 3.6% discount versus the annual mean—as consumer demand for tools is at its annual nadir. April and May represent the worst months, as spring renovation demand resurges. The effect is consistent across both power tools and hand tools.
Beauty and skincare showed the smallest seasonal spread of any category, with a total range of roughly 6.2 index points between peak and trough. February was marginally the best buying month (index 96.2, or 3.8% below the annual average), driven partly by post-Valentine's Day demand decline, while November represented the peak, as gift season markup lifted prices by an average of 2.4% above yearly norms.
One of the more actionable findings in our dataset relates to price drop dynamics. When a product's price drops on Amazon, that drop is rarely the final one in a given cycle. Across the 48 million observations in our dataset, we found a consistent pattern we call the delay effect.
Across 61% of all price drops we observed, the price continued to decline after the initial drop before eventually recovering. The typical pattern was a trough at approximately day 11 to 14, after which Amazon's dynamic pricing algorithm begins to correct upward. This suggests that being alerted to a price drop immediately, but waiting a few days before purchasing if you're not in a hurry, can yield meaningful additional savings.
However, this comes with an important caveat: inventory risk increases with waiting. The 39% of products that did not continue dropping after the initial decline often sold out at that price within a week. For low-stock or high-demand items, the first price drop may be the only opportunity.
The practical takeaway is to treat these as two distinct strategies by product type. For commoditized, always-restocked items—mainstream electronics, kitchen appliances, tools—patience pays: the delay effect is real and inventory replenishes regularly, so waiting 7–14 days after an initial drop carries little risk. For limited-SKU or high-demand products—popular gaming consoles, trending toys, limited-edition gear—the calculus flips: act on the first drop, because a better price may not return before the item sells out.
Perhaps no finding in our dataset is more striking than what the data shows about Black Friday. The week of Black Friday (November 22 through December 2) is consistently treated by consumers as the premier deal event of the year. Our data tells a very different story.
January and February together accounted for 41% of annual price lows—nearly twice the share of Black Friday. Prime Day in July, which has grown considerably since its 2015 launch, captured 18%. Together, these three events account for 82% of annual price lows, with Black Friday ranking second, not first.
The Black Friday findings become more revealing when you examine reference price behavior in the weeks leading up to the event. Across our dataset, the average listed "original" price of products featured in Black Friday promotions rose by ~6% between the August baseline and mid-October—before the sale even began.
This matters because Amazon's Black Friday discounts are calculated against that elevated reference price. When the sale arrives, the math looks compelling: a product appears to be 14% below its inflated "original" price. But here's how that plays out in real numbers: if a product's true average price is $100, the reference price has been quietly raised to ~$106 by October. A stated 14% discount off $106 brings the sale price to ~$91—a real saving of just 9% versus what you'd normally pay. That means 36% of the advertised Black Friday discount was manufactured by inflating the reference price in the preceding weeks.
This is consistent with what we observe when looking at our own Black Friday pricing analysis: the phenomenon of inflated reference prices is not a fringe pattern. It appears across virtually every major product category in our dataset.
The abstract index numbers above are more intuitive when grounded in specific products. Here are three real examples from our tracking dataset that illustrate the broader patterns.
If the product you want isn't on sale right now and you don't need it immediately, the most rational strategy is to set a price alert at your target price and wait. Our data shows that for most product categories, prices will reach your target naturally over the course of a year, often in the January–February window, without any need to scramble during manufactured sale events.
The January and February price troughs described in this study are real, but they're also easy to miss. Prices at those levels often appear for a matter of days before recovering, and most shoppers aren't monitoring Amazon continuously.
Tools like Price Drop Notifications let you set a target price on any Amazon product and receive an email the moment the price hits your threshold. This means you can set your target in November, step away entirely from deal-watching, and get notified automatically when the price reaches its January low, without fighting Black Friday crowds or making decisions under manufactured urgency.
The data is clear on the core question: the best time to buy almost anything on Amazon is January and February, not Black Friday. Across six categories and seven years of price data, January produced the lowest average prices, the highest frequency of all-time product price lows, and the deepest category-level discounts, particularly for electronics and toys.
Black Friday is a real sale event, but a second-place one. The discounts are genuine but smaller than advertised—our data shows that roughly 36% of the average stated discount is manufactured through reference price inflation in the weeks before the sale. Prime Day in July is a closer competitor than most consumers realize, capturing 18% of annual price lows versus Black Friday's 23%.
The single most actionable finding from this research is simple: if you can wait, wait for January. And if you want to be notified the moment a price hits your target without monitoring Amazon yourself, a price drop alert is the most efficient way to capture those windows automatically.
Methodology note: Price data was collected via automated tracking of Amazon product listings. Prices represent the Buy Box price at time of observation. Third-party seller prices, subscribe-and-save pricing, and Prime-exclusive pricing were excluded to ensure consistency. Products with fewer than 90 days of observations or significant data gaps were removed from the dataset. The 2019–2025 time period includes the COVID-19 disruption period (2020–2021); category-level findings were validated against the pre-COVID (2019) and post-normalization (2022–2025) subsets and found to be consistent with the full-period results.
