Comparison Shopping Online with Scrooge

(Potential Savings: thousands of dollars per year. )
One of the most powerful aspects of the Internet has been the widening and perfecting of shopping information. Using only your own computer and a web browser like Internet Explorer or Netscape you can quickly and easily shop the world over for unique items and shop for the lowest prices on name-brand items. Google has two excellent free products that you can use to do just this. First is Catalogs google (found at http:// catalogs.google.com ) which lets you comparison shop between catalogs. Not all catalogs are listed, because some have specifi cally requested that they not be listed, but among the vast majority that are listed you can quickly comparison shop. Let’s take an example, suppose you are looking for a sound mixer and have decided on the Behringer brand – which, by the way, is an excellent German-engineered product at a very good price. You go to catalogs google and type in "behringer sound mixer" in the search box. Up pops 240 catalogs including the scan of each catalog page that the mixers are listed on. You can click on any of these pages to see more details and prices. Now let’s suppose you looked at many of these catalogs and decided that the model you really want is the Behringer UB1202 mixer. Go back to catalogs google and type in "Behringer UB1202 mixer" and click search. Up pops 14 catalogs where you can compare prices. From this search you see that American Musical Supply sells it for $79.99, All Pro Sound sells it for a dollar less, and Musicians Friend sells it for $79.99, etc. Prices are all very competitive so far, but probably much less than you local retail shop sells them for. Some of the catalogs scanned on catalogs google are also a year old so prices may be out of date. Now that you know the average catalog prices, let’s look at the next google tool – froogle google – found at http:// froogle.google.com/ . Again type in "Behringer UB1202 mixer" and up pops 75 hits with the prices listed. On this search you see that Same Day Music has the lowest price at $75 and Zoot Music has one of the highest prices at $209. Most others fall in the range of $80 to $100. However when you click on Same Day Music you see that the price has now jumped up to $90. This might be a trick that they used to get their prices listed in the search Comparison Shopping Online with Scrooge Potential Savings: thousands of dollars per year. One of the most powerful aspects of the Internet has been the widening and perfecting of shopping information. Using only your own computer and a web browser like Internet Explorer or Netscape you can quickly and easily shop the world over for unique items and shop for the lowest prices on name-brand items. Google has two excellent free products that you can use to do just this. First is Catalogs google (found at http:// catalogs.google.com ) which lets you comparison shop between catalogs. Not all catalogs are listed, because some have specifi cally requested that they not be listed, but among the vast majority that are listed you can quickly comparison shop. Let’s take an example, suppose you are looking for a sound mixer and have decided on the Behringer brand – which, by the way, is an excellent German-engineered product at a very
engines and then the raised the price as soon as it was listed. In any rate the next lowest price listed is $79.99 at Select Rebate and when you click on it you can see that it really is selling for $79.99 - but wait a minute, check the price of shipping! It’s $17 ! That’s a 21% charge for shipping! Wow! Better look elsewhere.
We have gone through this exercise to see where the lowest prices are clustered. Now you know that you shouldn’t pay more than $80 for the mixer (by the way this mixer sells for $120 at my local retail music shop) and you should look for a lower shipping cost, and probably shop out of state (or out of province in Canada) to avoid as much tax as possible.
Now let’s check e-Bay. This online auction and shopping site is the great equalizer. If you keep looking you can eventually find almost anything you want on e-Bay and almost always at a better price than you can get it elsewhere.
At e-Bay (http://www.ebay.com/ ) type in "Behringer UB1202 mixer" in the search box and up pops 8 hits (at least it did on the day I searched). One has several bids and is bid up to $20 but has several more days on the auction block. As most of the price increases come in during the last few hours – or even minutes – this one may go for close to $70. However, there is also another one listed for $50 and has no bids. This poor fellow listed it too high and has attracted no bidders. My bet is nobody will bid on this one. So this would be a good candidate to bid on in the last few minutes. It looks like it was a customer return and the manual is missing (but available on the website). These factors will also depress the price. Shipping by Fedex is only $11 – not a bad deal.
This last one would probably be my choice if I could buy it for $50. This would mean even with shipping it would be about 50% cheaper than my local retailer. If I could do all my shopping this way I would save thousands of dollars every year.
Books are another story – pardon the pun. I’ve usually found the best book deals on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com ) in the second hand sections of each book listing. They list new books at a discount and they also have second hand books offered on the same page. I’ve gotten some second hand books through them for only a few dollars in some cases. Here is an example of the savings: type in "Martha Stewart Living Annual Recipes 2004" in the search box. You will see the regular retail is $34.95 and Amazon’s price is $24.46. But if you buy it second hand from one of the selling partners the price is only $11.75 – and its condition is listed as "like new". This is certainly the best deal. And as a double check a quick look at froogle google shows the lowest seller (HamiltonBook.com) offering it for new at $17.95 … hey, that’s lower than the new book Amazon discounted price! I told you those google tools were good.

Scrooge
Ps...prices are as of August 2004