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Where Did All The Online Bargains Go?
cornflux writes: "There's something I've wondered recently -- 'Where did all the good deals go?' It seems I'm not the only one -- Business 2.0 has an article about the noticable lack of bargains available online, today. The author covers obvious reasons (dried up VC, need for real profit) and some others (pseudo-price fixing). The one thing that was missed is the ever-increasing number of morons who will pay full-retail price + 20% for things on eBay." Note that the piece is largely theoretical -- I've found consistently better prices on the web, even recently, than I have in-store for electronic goods, as well as obscure DVDs which I couldn't find locally anyhow.
Try and pick any electronics in your local CompUSA or Fry then go to PriceGrabber or my favorite Pricewatch and you will see there is plenty of good deals on the net.
Often you have to go thru a special Netpage or input a comment for getting the PriceWatch price. I find it a bit annoying but understand the reasoning.
Help fight continental drift.
Perhaps you have never been to Fatwallet.com or Anandtech's hot deals forum?
I think if you walked away with an Empeg car unit for $199 rather than the original $1k++ pricetag, you might feel otherwise.
Computer hardware is still priced much better online than it is in local stores. That might be because I live in a smaller city, with no large cities nearby, I don't know. Not only is it cheaper, but I can find any parts I need, unlike the local stores, which carry only pre-assembled crap from Compaq and the like. I don't know what I'd do without NewEgg.
The truth of the matter is, more people are willing to pay extra to get quality. Case in point: my first online purchase (2 years ago) was a CD burner, and I bought it from the retailer who had the cheapest price. Three months later, still without my CD burner, the company (TheBigStore.com) was out of business, and my $200 was gone.
Now when I buy online, I don't even bother looking for the cheapest price, because I want to know I will recieve my product. I order from reputable big-name companies such as Amazon and WalMart.
One thing the author didn't touch on is the power of the RIAA. I wonder what kind of leway the RIAA gives distributers in pricing CD's? Rather then looking at CD's, the author should've discussed home electronics. Bizrate is a great example of bargains available online. I once bought a Sony camcorder that retails at the Sony Store for $1,800 - I bought it through Bizrate for $800 - a whole $1000 cheaper!
Your comment "I have noticed lately pricewatch.com isn't the best place to go online for the best price", might be true but this must be the doing of the retailers not Pricewatch themselves. They would have no interest nor means to hike the price. They would have all the interest in the world to see lower prices as this is the sole reason for their existence.
Help fight continental drift.
One word. Pricewatch.
The one thing for which I ever shopped online was DVDs, and the market has simply DRIED UP.
I used to be particularly fond of reel.com and dvdexpress.com. The former offered some really spectacular deals-- mostly "loss leaders" on major titles (I remember getting "The Matrix" for $12.49) so they could attract the unsure, never-shopped-online buyer, particularly on pre-orders. (It was the equivalent of CompUSA offering a $500 computer on the front page of their flyer, so that the casual customer might be tempted to wander in.) The latter site had generally better prices on the everyday titles. Comparison shop and you'd find great deals, typically better than with retail stores (even with shipping factored in).
The situation these days is terrible. Reel went bust and became a front for buy.com. Buy offered less impressive prices, but it was still sometimes better than shopping in the "real" world. That fell through, or something, and now Reel is a front for 800.com. It's not even worth the time to look.
DVDexpress is even worse. Like most of the rest of express.com, they just sort of stopped shipping product for a good long while as they figured out their financial situations, then reopened their store some time later-- with the kind of prices you'd expect to pay at Suncoast.
These days, if I'm looking to buy a new DVD, I'll most likely drive to Best Buy. They're not always the cheapest sticker price, but shipping isn't a factor, and except in particularly rare cases, this means the final cost is less. I've found that the websites attached to retail stores-- bestbuy.com, circuitcity.com, and so on-- always sync their prices with their real-world counterparts, so they're only useful if you're wondering how much you're going to pay when you get to the store.
The only beacon of hope? I'm in love with deepdiscountdvd.com. They have some screwy prices at first glance, sometimes even a buck, buck and a half more than the other sites, but this is because they also offer "free shipping:" you're going to pay exactly what you see. The site is particularly nice when it comes to, surprise surprise, pre-orders. My hope is that they don't sell out to one of the larger online retailers, because then shopping online would become exactly what we're all afraid of for the net: it'd be nothing more than a counterpart to a small assortment of large real-world corporations.
I really miss the old days, when those of us willing to brave online shopping were treated to unreal deals just because the sites needed to get attention. This is what ate the sites alive, I'm sure, but damn if I don't love the idea of getting cheaper movies because of some sucker venture capitalist.
And don't even get me started on shopping for books online.
Here are links I always use when Pay Day comes around. Some of them aren't rock-bottom deals, but they are quite reasonable (i.e. better than Best Buy):
Computer Stuff
www.techbargains.com
www.newegg.com
Video Games
www.ebgames.com
www.easybuy2000.com
DVD's
www.dvdpricesearch.com
Books
www.bestbookbuys.com
www.bookpool.com (they have more used i think) Price Comparison
www.pricewatch.com
www.pricescan.com
I'd love to hear from others on this, I wouldn't mind saving more! :)
-jc
When buyers have limited information on pricing, sellers can charge a wide range of prices in different locales. As better communications and hence better pricing information becomes available, prices become more uniform. This is initially due to arbitrage (buying a commodity where it is priced low, and reselling somewhere else at a higher price). Later sellers are forced to make their prices more uniform to compete effectively.
A similar effect happened over a hundred and fifty years ago with the invention of the telegraph (see The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage). The Internet initially allowed consumers to a) gain pricing information instantly across the world and b) order goods priced far lower than those available locally. Anecdotally, I've noticed local prices of computer parts at local retailers used to be consistently higher than on-line prices. This is no longer true, frequently I can get better buys from local retailers.
[Insert pithy quote here]
eBay, on the other hand, is an entirely different can of worms. Buyers (and, alas, sellers) range from the very knowledgeable to the completely ignorant. For science fiction first editions, most of the people I know on there will open another window and search for a particularly interesting item on ABE before bidding on eBay. But there are many people who will bid several times what an item is listed for on ABE just because they don't know about the latter.
This is not to say that ABE has completely replaced the local speciality bookseller. For example, I still buy quite a few things at Adventures in Crime and Space, Austin's local SF shop, because I know the owners, its convienant, and many times you see things browsing that you wouldn't know to look for. But many speciality shops are themselves on ABE, especially given the tough post 9/11 business climate.
A free bookbuying tip: Many times, the exact same copy of a used book listed on ABE will show up on Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com, but at 2-5 times the price listed on ABE. That's because ABE has "affiliate" programs that allow such books to be listed on those services, but B&N and Amazon always jack the price up to give themselves a hefty profit margin.
As for conclusions beyond the world of books: Whenever possible, use search engines that give you listings from many different dealers. (It also helps if you have a service like ABE that kicks dealers off if they receive too many complaints.)
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I know of a study that researchers went to a shopping mall with two jars. One was full of cookies, and the other had only one or two.
They were the same cookie, but people answered that the ones that came from the jar with less cookies were more delicious.
That's a classic for anyone who went to college and studied Advertisement (like I did for 2 years), but it's always worth to remember.
And of course, you can enlarge this 'rule' to several other areas. Diamonds/gold are expensive because they are rare. And brunnete women are hotter in Sweden because the predominant feminine type there is blond.
Anyway, the article is temporal. Sophisticated customers is, if true, at maximum, a temporary effect. More and more 'common' people are using the internet, and this trend will only continue to rise in the future.
And you know, despite what many people think, most rich people do NOT spend a lot of money. On contrary, they SAVE a lot. There are a lot of more millionaries in the world than the guy from your school that got a expensive car from his daddy. And the tip Nr. 1 from these abundant but hidden rich people is: "Save every penny".
I think the study made by Charles Wood had such fallacy on it, and what in fact happened is that he justified the higher prices with a limited cause, and not the contrary. That's usually not how decent social researchs are done.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
Many large retailers are public companies, and as such they have to release financial information about their business. In this information is their revenue, their Cost of Goods Sold, sometimes abreviated as COGS, which is their cost, Selling General & Administrative, abriviated as SG&A which will usually contain most of their costs in the markup this usually leaves operating profit, which they subtract their interest and other expenses from leaving net profit. So while this does not show the markup of the item you are buying, but it does give an average. Some will also break their revenue and costs out by there segments, search for segment in the 10-Q. All of these are available here.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
While nice in theory, this attitude doesn't work in real life. That's why we (in the USA, anyway) have agencies like the FDA [fda.com].
The FDA does not regulate herbals. That is why they are all required to have a disclaimer that says "These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to prevent, diagnose, treat, or cure any disease"
Someone sould sell ground up acorns and say it reduces the risk of cancer, and the FDA wouldn't do anything about it. In fact, most popular herbals are BS scams like that.
Repeal the DMCA!
Two and three years ago, online sales were a mammoth below-cost bazaar. But as the entrants found they had to achieve profitability, and this quarter, they started to disappear. In some markets, brick-and-mortars took over their competitors that were threatening to bury them only a few months before. For instance, take PetSmart's buyout of pets.com, or KB Kids' buyout of eToys.com (a spectacular flamout). This is natural, and in the long term, for the better. What are left are in fact the low-overhead guys, the ones who didn't start with enormous, get-rich-quick dreams. There's still a lot of vendors making money over at the Yahoo stores, believe it or not.
Pricewatch, PriceGrabber, et al are in the online comparison shopping business. All of them charge their merchants for listings; the real question is how. With Pricewatch, the vendors are charged based on the number of products listed, which means you essentially get a list of whatever the retailer thinks are his strongest sale products at the moment. There's two disadvantages for the site visitor (consumer) in this: first, it reduces the breadth of merchants, and second, it hides a fair amount of products. Pricegrabber does a better job of this simply because their underlying pricing structure doesn't automatically discourage merchants from showing more products. (Of course, there's nothing preventing merchants from being selective for their own reasons, but at least it's not an issue financially.)
From personal experience, the difference between online and brick-and-mortar prices is narrowing generally, but that doesn't mean there aren't bargains out there. Where I use our own site most is on unusual items that most b&m's won't stock (for instance, SCSI drives). Even when looking at more commodity items (ATA drives, CD-R media), it pays to at least check prices online to see whether the price delta and convenience factor combined are worth it to you. (For many people who don't live near big cities, online is the only realistic option and a great salvation.) Also, don't forget that there's a much broader selection available online than off. It's not unusual to find a product available online that even big-box retailers are out of. I recently bought a Samsung N501 DVD player through a merchant on our site that was not only substantially more expensive at our local Best Buy, but out of stock as well.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Actually, diamonds aren't as rare as they'd have you think -- the supply is simply restricted so that demand is artificially higher than supply.
And yes, two months' salary is too much to pay, thank you very much...
(I recall an advertisement that aired several years ago that showed a woman receiving a diamond ring, but only in silhouette. As she was being presented with the diamond, they cut to a close-up that looked very much like she was getting ready to perform oral sex on the presenter of the ring... Doesn't take a genius to figure out the point of that commercial...)
YMMV
C8H10N4O2 | Developer > Code
Check out these forums:
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
Last month I was in the market for a new stereo receiver. I looked on Ebay - found what I wanted (an Onkyo TX-DS696) at a decent price ($600 - it retails for around $800). Put in my max bid... and watched it close $200 above retail, with 75% of the bidding in the last two minutes of the auction.
Rather than paying $800 or $1000 for what I wanted, I emailed the guy selling the receiver I had just lost. He offered to sell me the receiever for his shop's actual retail price of $650 + actual shipping. Sweet. I got it two days later, double boxed and in perfect shape.
I've since bought an SACD player the same way.
WAY better than dealing with the morons on Ebay.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
FWIW, I've had significantly better experiences with (www.)pricescan(.com) than pricewatch (ie. getting lower prices for the same items). Checkitout.
Seeing it's a shameless plug by you, I did check it out.
Athlon XP 2000+ Pricewatch: $284 - Pricescan: $315
Athlon XP 1800+ Pricewatch: $143 - Pricescan: $148
PC2100 512 MB Pricewatch: $116 - Pricescan: $135
Maxtor 80GB Pricewatch: $115 - Pricescan: $125
I'm guessing your significantly better experiences come from your working there, more than price comparisons in a similar market.
-Spackler
PS: Moderators, is it really a troll or a flame when he said to check it out, and I just did a little research on the subject to save my fellow slashdotters a little time? I think not.
Sorry, but you are wrong on this. If a product is sold by a business to a customer in a state that the business operates, that business must collect sales tax. It is the same way that if you go down to a store down the street. However, if the business is in a different state, the US Supreme Court has ruled that the state cannot force a company that is operating outside of its jurisdiction to collect sales tax. Many states, however, have put the burden of paying sales tax on the individual. Now, states very rarily have the resources to crack down on this and often people don't even know these laws. In addition, counties and towns can add their own sales tax laws. So all of these are the responsibility of the individual.
Because the states, counties, and municipalities make their own tax laws, this has been the main reason that congress has not enacted a internet tax [in addition to the fact that it could prevent growth in the industry]. Below, I've copied a number of state's out of state sales tax laws.
New Jersey:
Pennsylvania:
California:
Maine:
btw: I Am Not A Lawyer (IANAL)
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."