It's the holiday season, which means it's time for retailers to bombard you with sales, special offers, and other attempts to sell you things.

For many people, the Black Friday-to-Christmas shopping rush will lead to Amazon. It makes sense: The e-commerce giant sells a whole lot of products and makes it very easy to buy them. Many times, those products are less expensive than they are elsewhere.

But not always. Though most people seem to be satisfied with the Amazon shopping experience, certain aspects of it can still be misleading.

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Thankfully, there are tools you can and should use to counteract them. Let's talk about two: Camelcamelcamel and Fakespot.

Finding a good deal

The first is pretty straightforward. Camelcamelcamel is one of many product price trackers floating around the web, but it has been popular and reliable for the better part of a decade. Simply copy and paste the URL of whatever item you're considering, and CCC brings up a chart of how that item's price has fluctuated over time.

For instance, Amazon is currently promoting this Dell monitor as part of a pre-Black Friday sales event. It's a little dated, but at $199, it's said to be $150 off its list price.

(Screenshot/Jeff Dunn (Screenshot/Jeff Dunn)

Pretty good deal, right? Sort of.

Throw the link into CCC and you'll see it has been at $199 several times in the past. At one point, Amazon had it for $185. Over the last few months, it has often sat around $210 or $220. So you're really saving about $10 to $30, not $150.

That's not bad, but on a day like Black Friday, when Amazon and the rest of the internet plan to overwhelm you with so-called savings, it may not be the impulse buy it first appears to be.

What the monitor's price history looks like.Business Insider/Jeff Dunn

What the monitor's price history looks like (Business Insider/Jeff Dunn)

There are more egregious examples. Though Amazon is home to many legitimate bargains, its status as the best place to shop is often overblown. Like with any other retailer, the vast majority of its "deals" aren't really deals — in fact, some independent studies have found it promotes its own stuff over cheaper options, and that Google is often just as, if not more, competitive.

This is all to remind you that retailers aren't charities. While it's not perfect — Amazon has prevented certain products from being price-tracked in the past — a tool like CCC or the browser extension Keepa provides the context that Amazon often withholds. That it lets you create a price watch list only helps.

Weeding out shoddy reviews

Fakespot isn't as plainly beneficial as CCC, but it's still a good thing to keep tabs on.

The literary masterpieces we call Amazon user reviews aren't always forthright — there's the inherent shakiness of the user-solicited Amazon Vine program for one, but it's also not uncommon for a company to outright fake batches of glowing reviews to boost a product's appeal. Amazon has fought this for a long time and is getting better about it.

The idea with Fakespot is to quickly get a sense of just how genuine those reviews are. Again, all you have to do is paste a link — Fakespot will then analyse the product's user reviews and grade them on their trustworthiness.

(Business Insider/Jeff Dunn (Business Insider/Jeff Dunn)

Naturally, it's harder for something like this to be foolproof.

Fakespot says it primarily judges a review's authenticity on "the language utilised by the reviewer, the profile of the reviewer, correlation with other reviewers' data, and machine learning algorithm that focuses on improving itself by detecting fraudulent review," but sometimes people with poor English are just excited about a thing. And again, this isn't the only site to use this idea.

Nevertheless, if you're on the fence about a certain product, especially if it comes from a brand you don't know, it's always good to be safe. This helps with that.

The next time you find a deal that seems too good to be true, just know that it actually might be.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.

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