You can’t turn around at the moment without one topic dominating your attention: Black Friday. This week, the annual slew of sales shifts into high gear, as ahead of the holidays, retailers and etailers alike try tempt customers with an array of discounts.

Savvy shoppers often wait till this week to try pick everything from games and consoles to big ticket items TVs at a much reduced price. And certainly you can. For example, if you are a PS4 gamer, then PS4’s recently announced price drops may interest.

The discounts include being able to pick up a PS4 with a pack of games from R4500, the PlayStation VR with camera and VR worlds for R3500 and an assortment of games, including Game of the Year contender Marvel’s Spider-Man for R300, while Days Gone is set to a far more doable price of R500. As well, a 12 month PS Plus membership has also received a healthy discount, down from R900 to around R650 over at Raru.co.za – but only for a limited time.

If TVs are more top of mind, then you are likely going to want to keep a close eye on Samsung, as the company has been teasing that it will offer “the biggest Black Friday deals” to date. While some of those deals are likely to be found at Makro and online, the company has stressed that the biggest discounts on its products will be found at Samsung stores.

With this in mind keen shoppers can get an early in for their annual price slashes on their QLED TVs, smartphones and Galaxy Watches by going to their site and choosing to be notified by email when certain deals go live.  

If you are looking for more general items, then you may want to take a look at Makro’s recently released Black Friday catalogue as well as its daily deals. The discounts on a range of TVs range from the R2000 mark up to R10 000. As well, there are electronics also getting price slashed, from notebooks and cameras to heavy  appliances like fridges. And, for pretty much everything under the sun, there is Takealot. Its Blue Dot sale, which is already running, is seeing discounts of around 10-25%, sometimes a bit higher, on electronics as well, including some items that aren't sexy but still necessary, like routers.

In Takealot's cased, based on prior experience the biggest question mark is not whether you may find something that has been discounted that you may want to buy, but whether you will be able to.

For consecutive years, their servers have fallen over, unable to cope with the demand on the big day and left irate shoppers in its wake. Whether we have a repeat of that this year remains to be seen.

The one caveat – apart from taking care not to over extend yourself or break the bank ahead of the holidays – is to ensure you remain secure while shopping online. We’ll explore a few tips in further articles to help you do just that.