A waste of time or a vintage year? We review Black Friday and Telegraph readers’ most-shopped deals

For the team at Telegraph Recommended, Black Friday is one of the biggest days of the year. It’s the time when you can buy the products we rigorously test for less, and we spend most of November getting our shopping guides ready, checking prices and noting early deals.

Then, once the sales go live, we work around the clock to bring you genuine discounts on tested products. I’m reluctant to say that it’s hard work – it’s sitting and staring at a screen for eight hours a day, after all – but it requires careful thought, an eye for detail and a willingness to check, check and check again.

When you’re staring down the barrel of ten days of deal hunting, you really hope those deals will be worth it. But were they actually? Now that the dust has settled on Black Friday 2025, our deals experts share their verdict. Plus, we’ve analysed the data to see which products were most popular with Telegraph readers. A couple are even still on sale.

The most popular Black Friday deals: At a glance

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We score every product we test according to a series of set metrics, so it’s only fair to give Black Friday the same treatment. Here’s how it fared:

Overall score: 8/10

Black Friday used to be a single day of deals to shop in store and once those products were gone, they were gone. Now that most Black Friday shopping takes place online, and many deals launch in early November, it’s harder to find such big discounts, but it’s easier to make a considered purchase. While brands notoriously raise prices before sales, through our verification work, we still found genuine deals across all our product categories.

Depth of discounts: 8/10

Rather than taking the RRP at face value, we use price trackers to compare deals prices with a product’s price over time. This was easier to apply to big-name brands than smaller stores, so sometimes our editors would have to use their discretion, but on the whole we were pleasantly surprised by the proportion of genuine deals.

Breadth of deals: 8/10

We were hunting for deals across home, garden, sleep, tech, beauty, health and fitness, travel and outdoor, parenting, and Christmas gifts – but some categories were better represented than others. We were pleased to see offers on seasonal items like dehumidifiers, but we’d have liked to see more deals in the parenting space.

Quality of products: 9/10

Many, but not all, of our Best Buy and Best Value items were listed for less over the Black Friday weekend. These products had already proved their credentials in our tests, and while we’re confident they’re still worth the money at full price, it’s always satisfying to find a quality product at a reduced price.