Meet The Sift: Discover Black Friday Offers Weeks Before the Sale

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Black Friday used to be much simpler. In the weeks leading up to it, you’d get your hands on retailer ad scans and you’d flip through them to decide which offers to go after when the sale started. Nowadays, ad scans aren’t as common, and the information is spread out across circulars, forum threads and various websites.

In the last two years we’ve even seen online spreadsheets posted by SirNelson69 and Eragon earn tons of positive feedback from our community, so we built a tool inspired by their work.

We call it The Sift. It’s a single list of every Black Friday offer we can find before the sale starts. Browse it, filter it to the retailers and categories you care about, and save the handful of things you plan to buy. No account needed.

Right now The Sift holds 1,500+ offers from 9 retailers across 19 categories, with an average discount of 32%. And we’ll be adding a lot more as new offers are released.

What The Sift Is

The Sift is a place to discover what’s coming. Each row is a unique offer a retailer has announced for Black Friday, pulled from its ad, an announcement or a direct submission. It opens in late October and runs through the end of Cyber Week.

Offers aren’t the same as deals, which our community posts, votes on and discusses. But the most-saved offers are likely to become deals, and when that happens, the offer links to the deal, so you can read the comments and see the deal score. Until then, it links to the retailer’s site. Either way, prices and dates come from retailer announcements, and retailers change their minds, so verify before you buy.

The name is the idea. A prospector sifts through a pan of gravel and silt to find the few flecks of gold worth keeping. You sift through the Black Friday offers to discover the things worth buying, and The Sift is the pan.

Why We Built It

We used to have a dedicated hub for Black Friday ad scans, but it no longer fits how retailers share their offers. The Slickdeals Frontpage is the best place to shop Black Friday on the day itself, but it wasn’t built for the three weeks before. The Sift was built for that period.

How It Works

Start by browsing. No shopping list yet? Just poke around. You can sift through all the offers by category, retailer or even discount level to help you find something worth saving. If you already know what you want, the search bar will tell you whether a matching offer exists. If you only want what you can buy right now, the Live Now filter narrows things to offers that have already gone live. Your filters and sort live in the page link, so you can send a friend your exact view by copying the URL.

See what other shoppers are watching. Every offer shows how many people have saved it, which is a quick read on what other shoppers are eyeing. The ten most-saved offers in each category get a Top Saved badge, and the list starts with the most-saved by default. If you’d rather hunt for bargains, you can always switch the sort to percent off or sale price.

Save the ones you plan to buy. Tap the save icon and the offer goes straight to your Saved page, so you can retire the ten tabs and the notes app. Think of it as your shortlist. The Saved page uses the same filters, sort and search as the main list, and it starts with whatever goes live soonest, so you always know what’s coming up next. Saving is free and doesn’t need an account. Your list just stays on the device and browser you’re using.

Sign in if you want more. Your list follows you from phone to laptop, and anything you saved on a device before signing in gets added to it. You can also turn on a reminder email the day before a saved offer goes live (as long as we know its date), so a sale doesn’t sneak up on you. Reminders are off until you turn them on, they’re easy to turn off again, and all they need is a confirmed email address.

Check back for sealed offers. Some retailers show us their Black Friday ads early, as long as we keep them under wraps until a set date. So we do. Instead of the offers, you’ll find a sealed card for each of those retailers at the bottom of the page. It shows how many offers are waiting, the top three categories they cover and the day they unlock. If one of them is where you planned to shop, that’s worth knowing before you spend your budget elsewhere. Come back on unlock day, or sign in and tap the notify button to get an email when they open.

What Happens Closer to Black Friday

Around mid-November, The Sift shifts gears. A banner and a carousel of the top community-voted deals point you to what’s live on Slickdeals, so you can take the shortlist you built and go shopping. Your saved list stays right where you left it.

Try It

The Sift is built for Black Friday 2026. Open it at https://slickdeals.net/sift/black-friday-deals on your laptop or in your phone’s browser.

If you have feedback (or praise!) or spot an offer we missed, let us know in the discussion thread in the forums.