How to Set a Price Alert for EOFY (And Stop Manually Refreshing Product Pages)

EOFY sales in Australia officially kick off in June, but the smart shopping starts right now.

Here is the thing most people do not realise: by the time a "50% off" banner appears on a retailer's website, you have already lost the advantage. You do not know if that price is genuine. You are competing with thousands of other shoppers for the same stock. And you are making a fast decision with real money, under artificial time pressure that retailers engineer on purpose.

Setting a price alert before EOFY changes all of that. You capture the real price today, build a verified price history over the coming weeks, and get notified the moment a genuine drop happens. No refreshing product pages every morning. No spreadsheet of prices you copied down by hand. Just a notification that tells you exactly when it is time to buy.

This guide explains when EOFY sales actually start, what is worth tracking, how price history protects you from fake discounts, and how to set up a price alert in under a minute.

When Do EOFY Sales Start in Australia?

The short answer: late May. The full picture is more useful than that.

Australia's financial year ends on 30 June every year. In the weeks before that date, retailers across the country run their largest sale event of the mid-year calendar, comparable in scale to Black Friday and Boxing Day. 

The difference is that EOFY has a tax dimension Black Friday does not: many purchases made before 30 June are claimable as business or work-from-home deductions, which gives Australian shoppers a genuine financial reason to buy in June rather than waiting.

Here is how the EOFY timeline typically unfolds:

Late May: JB Hi-Fi and Kogan are usually first out, with teaser discounts and early access offers on tech and electronics. lenovo.com often begins its EOFY campaign in this window too, with discounts on laptops and workstations.

Early June: Harvey Norman, The Good Guys, and Appliances Online ramp up across appliances, TVs, and home office equipment. This is when the serious appliance deals start appearing.

Mid June: Myer, Big W, Bing Lee, Baby Bunting, Chemist Warehouse, and Priceline Pharmacy typically roll out their EOFY events. Furniture retailers like Fantastic Furniture and Amart Furniture tend to follow in this window.

Final two weeks of June: The deepest discounts on big-ticket items tend to land here, as retailers push hard to clear stock before the financial year closes. This is also when FOMO peaks and when the most impulsive purchases happen.

The part nobody talks about enough: some retailers adjust their "was" prices in the weeks before EOFY begins. So the "was $1,899, now $1,299" tag you see in mid-June may reflect a price that was quietly lifted in May to make the sale look more dramatic. The ACCC has previously warned about this practice, but it remains common.

The only reliable defence is knowing what the product actually cost before the sale season started. That is exactly what price history gives you.

What Is a Price Alert App and How Does It Work?

A price alert app is a tool that monitors the price of a specific product on a retailer's website and sends you a notification when that price changes or drops to a level you have specified.

Instead of manually checking a product page every few days, you add the product URL to the app once. The app then checks the price automatically and continuously, recording each change over time. That recorded data becomes the product's price history. When the price hits the target you have set, you receive an alert.

Whisprice works across any Australian online retailer, from major chains like Kogan, Myer, and Appliances Online to independent stores and niche retailers. You add a product URL, Whisprice starts tracking, and you walk away. The app handles everything from that point.

For EOFY specifically, a price alert app gives you three things most shoppers do not have: a verified price baseline before the sales begin, a full price history that exposes fake discounts, and an instant notification so you can act quickly when a genuine deal lands.

Why Price History Matters More Than the Discount Percentage

A 40% off tag tells you nothing on its own. It tells you the difference between two numbers a retailer chose. It does not tell you whether the original price was inflated, whether the current price is actually the lowest it has been, or whether the same product dropped further during Click Frenzy three months ago.

Price history tells you all of that.

When you add a product to Whisprice, the app begins recording its price from that moment. Over days and weeks, a chart builds up. By the time EOFY arrives, you can look at that chart and see immediately whether a sale price represents a genuine drop or whether the product has been sitting at roughly the same price all along with a new label on it.

This is particularly important for higher-consideration purchases: laptops, TVs, prams, appliances. These are products people research for weeks. With price history in hand, you are not guessing whether June is a good time to buy. You can see it.

A product that has held at $899 for three months and suddenly drops to $699 during EOFY is a real deal. A product that was $699 in February, crept up to $899 in May, and is now "on sale" at $749 is not. Price history is the difference between those two situations.

What to Track Before EOFY Starts

These are the product categories where genuine EOFY discounts happen most consistently in Australia. The time to add them to your tracking list is now, not in June.

Laptops and computers

EOFY is one of the strongest windows of the year for laptop purchases in Australia. Sole traders and small business owners can often claim a work laptop as a tax deduction, which makes the June timing particularly attractive.

Brands like Lenovo and Dell regularly see meaningful discounts at Kogan, Bing Lee, and Appliances Online. The key is to add your shortlisted model now so that when a sale price appears, you have weeks of real price data to compare it against rather than taking the retailer's "was" price at face value.

TVs and home entertainment

New television models from Samsung, LG, and TCL typically arrive in Australian stores in April and May following their global launches earlier in the year. That influx of new stock pushes the previous year's range toward clearance pricing right as EOFY hits, which is why TV deals during this period can be genuinely strong.

Kogan, Bing Lee, and Big W are worth watching closely. If you have been waiting on a 55-inch or 65-inch 4K set, add your target model now and let the price history tell you when June's deal is real.

Coffee machines and kitchen appliances

Breville, De'Longhi, and Nespresso machines appear in EOFY catalogues every year without fail. Air fryers, blenders, stand mixers, and other kitchen appliances follow the same pattern.

Myer and Appliances Online are consistently among the stronger retailers here. These are products where inflated "was" prices are common, making price history especially valuable.

Home office equipment

Monitors, ergonomic chairs, webcams, standing desks, and printers are among the most popular EOFY categories, driven partly by the tax deduction angle for remote workers. Officeworks and Bing Lee tend to run strong promotions across this category. These products also tend to sell out quickly once a genuine deal hits, so having a price alert ready means you can move fast rather than discovering the deal an hour after it expired.

Robot vacuums and floor care

ECOVACS, Dyson, and Roborock run some of their deepest discounts of the year during EOFY. Premium robot vacuums and cordless stick vacuums are big-ticket items that see real price movement in this period. If you have been watching one, now is the right time to add it and start building history.

Baby and nursery products

Baby Bunting runs notable EOFY promotions across prams, car seats, high chairs, cots, and nursery furniture. These are some of the largest planned purchases new parents make, often researched over months. Setting a price alert well before June means you are not making a time-pressured decision at the checkout on a product that costs several hundred dollars. You have already done the research. The alert simply tells you when the price is right.

Health, beauty, and pharmacy

Chemist Warehouse and Priceline Pharmacy both run EOFY promotions on vitamins, supplements, skincare, and health products. These categories are easy to overlook in the noise of tech and appliances, but if you regularly buy specific products in volume, tracking them through EOFY can save meaningfully over the course of a year.

Furniture and homewares

Furniture goes on sale infrequently compared to electronics, which makes EOFY one of the better opportunities of the year. Fantastic Furniture, Amart Furniture, and Big W tend to run promotions on sofas, dining sets, and bed frames in June. These are purchases where a genuine 15 to 20% discount represents hundreds of dollars. A price alert is particularly well-suited here because furniture prices do not move often, so when they do, it matters.

How to Set a Price Alert with Whisprice

Setting a price alert takes under a minute. Here is the full process:

Step 1: Find the exact product page

Go to the retailer's website and navigate to the specific product you want to track. Not the category page or search results, the individual product page. It could be a laptop on Kogan, a pram on Baby Bunting, a coffee machine on Appliances Online, or a TV on Bing Lee. Whisprice works across any Australian online store with a standard product URL.

Copy the full URL from your browser's address bar.

Step 2: Add it to Whisprice

Open the Whisprice app and paste the product URL. Whisprice pulls the product name, current price, and image automatically, adds it to your wishlist, and begins tracking the price from that moment. You do not need to enter any price information manually.

This is when your price history clock starts. Every day from now until EOFY, Whisprice is quietly recording what that product costs.

Step 3: Read the price history

Once the product is added, Whisprice shows you its price history as a chart. If the product has been tracked by other Whisprice users previously, you may already have historical data to look at. If you are the first to add it, your history begins today and builds over time.

Look at the chart before you set your target. Has the price been climbing recently? Has it been stable? Has it dropped significantly in the past? This context is what separates informed buying from reactive buying.

Step 4: Set your target price

Enter the price you would genuinely be happy paying. Not a fantasy number, the real threshold at which you would confidently buy. Setting a target price is free on Whisprice. When the product reaches your target, Whisprice sends you a price drop alert. Price change alerts are free on Whisprice. Premium users can go further by setting a threshold, so you only get notified when the price drops by an amount that actually matters to you.

Step 5: Let it run

That is all there is to it. Whisprice monitors the price continuously in the background. You do not need to check the app, re-visit the product page, or set calendar reminders for when sales might start. When the price drops to your target, you will know.