Gubbins is the silly Scrabble-style word game you didn’t know you needed

First, a few thoughts on how to look at gift guides:

• Start with The Verge! Sorry, sorry, some ruthless self-promotion here to start. But we work really hard on deal roundups and gift guides, so be sure and check ’em all out. I particularly like our digital gift guide, our under-$50 guide, and (my personal fave this year) the For Dads guide. We’re also already deep into Black Friday, and have a big guide of the best deals this year.
• Only trust obviously human-made guides. If you see a guide that’s mostly populated by quotes from Amazon reviews, written by ChatGPT, or pulled from product listings, run the other way. A better way to start is by going to websites you already trust. Personally, I’ve found Gear Patrol also does a good job with buying and gift guides, Wirecutter rarely steers me wrong, and I’ve found a lot of good kitchen gadgets from our friends over at Eater. Oh, and nobody finds weird gifts like BuzzFeed does.
• You can always deal-shop old recommendations. A Thing or Two is one of my favorite sources of product recommendations, and their Secret Menu archive is just a long list of cool stuff to buy. Tina Roth-Eisenberg over at Swissmiss keeps a running list of gift-guide-y products every year, and every year, I scroll through the archive and end up buying a couple. Holiday-specific guides are often less useful than lists of cool stuff that someone made just because they’re excited about the stuff.
• You have to comparison shop yourself. All the price-comparison tools out there suck and are compromised in one way or another. Even the prices that show up in search previews often aren’t the real price! This is the most manual and annoying part of the process, but there’s really no shortcut.

So far, my advice is just “don’t trust the internet,” basically. But here are also a few tools worth installing or keeping open in a tab as you shop:

• Camelcamelcamel. Sales prices are lies — you’d be amazed how often they’re like, “20% off!” except it has never once actually cost that full price. Camelcamelcamel is a price tracker for Amazon, and it’ll show you whether the thing you’re about to buy might actually be cheaper some other time. The browser extension is the most convenient way to use it, but I like just using the website.
• Honey. I’ve spent a lot of time Googling, like, “Bose coupon codes” and then trying 100 coupon codes that never work. At least in my experience, this is a total waste of time. The Honey browser extension automates the coupon hunting, so if there is a deal out there, it’ll find it for you. It doesn’t always find the best possible deal, but it’s good enough and a lot less annoying than cutting and pasting all those codes. (I’ve also heard good things about Capital One Shopping, but I haven’t used it personally.)
• Fakespot. You really can’t trust most online product reviews anymore, you know? There are the obviously paid-for ones, the obviously AI ones, and then just a stream of less obvious but equally sketchy reviews on everything everywhere. Fakespot does a pretty good job of filtering out the fake stuff and up-ranking the human reviews, which is particularly helpful when you’re on Amazon deciding between two brands you’ve never heard of.

My most important piece of advice here is to never just Google the name of a product and buy from whatever shopping listing is the cheapest. That’s how you turn into me, buying a (fake) Dyson Airwrap from a (fake) Shopify store like a moron. Shopping search in general is a gameable, ugly ecosystem that often won’t lead you to good products at good prices. Instead, pick a site or a person whose taste you trust, do some research, and cross your fingers for a coupon code. 

Oh, and always, always, always check return policies. People get weird about returns during the holidays.