Singles Day is a big holiday in China for people to buy things for themselves. Some device manufacturers with international sales will offer deals on this day, often surprisingly good ones. Here’s a thread for this year.
The date is 11/11, but most companies will use the date in China, so the deals may be available on 10 November depending on where you live. Many companies only offer a one day sale, some a two day sale, and a few for a week so read carefully if you’re not buying immediately.
Here we go…
Starting with Flic! These are smart buttons about the size of a stack of 3 US quarters. They have a manufacturer-provided integration with SmartThings. Or Hue. Or IFTTT. Or Alexa routines. (Each button can only join one integration, but different buttons can do different ones.) you do need their mini hub if you want the integrations to work when your phone is not in range, and some integrations may require the mini hub.
Each button does tap, double tap, and long hold, so 3 actions from one button (but all for the same integration).
Anyway, I have a bunch of these and really like them. At the time of this writing, Flic buttons and the gigantic Echo brand buttons were the only button/switch that could start an Alexa routine.
The big drawback on these is the price, but there’s a sale for Singles Day this year, up to 40% off, which is huge for them. Several different bundles on this sale.
Flic Shop Singles Day | Flic Smart Button
And if you’re comfortable shopping at the big Chinese exporters, AliBaba, banggood, and gearbest, check them out. All three should be running hourly flash sales for singles day. Just remember to check product descriptions and returns policies carefully, this isn’t like shopping at Amazon. Also, all three occasionally have English translation issues and they will describe something as Wi-Fi which is actually Zigbee or vice versa. And if it’s a third-party seller on Alibaba be especially careful: they often lift pictures and product descriptions from other models when they don’t apply, and occasionally there are counterfeits. Many of the big device manufacturers like xioami Will not honor warrantees for products purchased at AliBaba for this reason. But if you already shop at these sites and understand the issues, there should be a lot of good singles day deals.