Black Friday Shopping Online...Are the Savings as Good?

We all know the drill, cook all day Thursday, stuff your faces, sit back in a tryptophan stupor while watching football game after football game, then its off to bed early to get ready for the big day ahead. Veteran black Friday shoppers are up by 3am to be in line by 4am or 5am at that one store that's going to get them the deals of the century. So what if this is all for naught?

The World Wide Web has opened the doors to the online marketplace, so who's to say that you can't do your Black Friday shopping online. But this line of thought raises some questions. We all know that stores bait you by putting one or two fantastic items on mega sale, but after waiting in line in the cold and dark, patrons enter the store only to find that they only had a handful of items in stock. The last thing you want to hear on black Friday is 'sorry about your luck'. But is online shopping different?

Online shopping opens up the doors of regular store shopping because you have the ability to order items that are oftentimes not even carried in all store locations. By ordering direct from their warehouse or the specific manufacturers that supply the stores items, shopping online almost guarantees that you'll be able to get an item that might be out of stock in the store. So by posting black Friday sales online, do stores essentially lose money? Or do they still have the ability to limit the number of purchases through the web?

After doing a little research I came across an online Black Friday Savings website. This site had all of the national stores listed with all of their pre-black Friday specials. Seeing as it is not black Friday yet, I have no way of knowing whether they will change the specials on Friday, but it seems as if they have all the inside information on the sales that these stores will be having.

I did a little comparison shopping (my sister wants an iPod Nano for the holidays). At Circuit City they had a pre-black Friday sale for the item and a 4GB Nano was $142.99. I visited the Apple Store to find that they have the Nano listed at $149.99. So off the bat it doesn't look like much savings, but Circuit City is offering free shipping on orders of $25 or more, so after calculating tax and the free shipping, it cheaper to get the Nano from Circuit City.

After doing more research I found that most stores are offering great sales combined with some sort of shipping deal on all of their items. So who's to say that shopping online isn't a better way to go? I wouldn't want to take the fun away from getting up a the crack of dawn to take a chance on that 'got to have' item, but do a little research before this years black Friday, you just may find that you can get amazing deals on the items you're looking for without even stepping foot out of the house.