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Black Friday Butler — never miss a time-limited Amazon deal on your storefront

Monitor your Amazon storefront on a cadence (5 minutes to 7 days) and log every Black-Friday-flagged or time-limited deal with timestamps.

What Black Friday Butler does

Around Q4 — Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Lightning Deals — Amazon time-stamps deals with countdowns. They're high-conversion windows for creators because the urgency moves audiences faster than a normal product post. But spotting them across your storefront manually is impossible: deals appear and expire while you're not looking.

Black Friday Butler watches your storefront on a cadence and logs every time-flagged deal it sees, with the timestamp it first appeared and the timestamp it expired. You get a structured log of every window you could have promoted, which feeds your posting decisions for the rest of the season.

Despite the name, it works year-round for any time-limited deal flagging — Black Friday is just the peak season.

Before you start

  • Your Amazon Creator storefront URL in the topbar (or paste a different one in the workspace).
  • A signed-in Amazon session in Chrome — Butler uses your existing session.

Running your first watch

  1. Open Black Friday Butler in the left nav.
  2. Confirm the Storefront URL field.
  3. Set Refresh cadence:
  • 5 minutes — only during the BFCM peak window. The Amazon side of the rate-limit budget is real.
  • 15 minutes (recommended default) — most of Q4. Catches Lightning Deals that often last 4-12 hours.
  • 1 hour to 7 days — off-peak monitoring. Useful for catching seasonal events outside Q4.
  1. Leave Debug slow-mo at 0. The slow-mo slider exists to help diagnose selector issues; raising it adds visible delays for debugging only.
  2. Click Start run.

A Chrome window opens, walks your storefront's deal-flagged content, and logs every time-limited entry with first-seen and expiry timestamps. The table fills in real-time; you can leave the window open and let it run for hours.

Working the results

The results table has one row per deal flagged:

  • Product — title + ASIN.
  • Deal type — Lightning Deal, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Limited Time, etc. (Amazon's own classification.)
  • First seen — when Butler first detected the flag.
  • Expires — when the flag is scheduled to lift (Amazon's countdown).
  • Discount — the % off at first detection.
  • Status — Active / Expired / Sold Out.

Use the data to plan posts:

  • Active deals expiring in the next 2-4 hours — highest urgency, post first.
  • Active deals with 12+ hours left — schedule a post mid-window.
  • Expired deals — keep in the log for trend analysis (which categories ran the most deals last BFCM?).

Export CSV dumps the filtered table for use outside Butler.

Why the cadence matters

Refresh cadence is the trade-off between freshness and rate-limit risk:

  • At 5-minute cadence, Butler hits the storefront 288 times/day. Amazon tolerates this for short windows (a few days) but flagging an account for sustained polling at this rate is a real risk.
  • At 15-minute cadence, 96 hits/day. Sustainable indefinitely.
  • At 1-hour cadence, 24 hits/day. Almost free.

The 5-min rate is a "pull only during the BFCM peak" setting. Don't leave it on year-round.

Tuning over time

  • Cadence by season — 15 minutes during Q4, 1 hour the rest of the year. Update once a quarter.
  • What to do with expired-deal data — export to a spreadsheet quarterly. Look for patterns: which categories ran the most deals, which brands offered the deepest discounts, which weekdays had peak deal density.
  • Debug slow-mo — only touch if you're investigating a selector issue and want to see the page interact slowly. Otherwise leave at 0.

Where the data goes

Per-deal history (with full timeline of state changes) lives in the preseed cache. CSV export from the table toolbar is the way out.

Common gotchas

  • "Amazon login required" — your session expired. Sign in via the Chrome window Butler spawned, click Resume.
  • Table fills up with the same product over and over — the deal toggled active/expired/active across refreshes. That's accurate to what Amazon showed; not a bug.
  • No deals found — your storefront might not have time-flagged content right now. Check directly on Amazon; if Amazon shows none, Butler will show none.
  • High CPU during 5-min cadence — Chrome stays open between refreshes by default. Some setups close Chrome between runs to drop the CPU floor; toggle in settings if you need it.

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