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.

Comments

No True Just need to look

[bstadil]

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.

Re:No True Just need to look

[Seanasy]

After going to Pricewatch, make sure you look up the business on ResellerRatings.com.

With few exceptions, the price is proportional to rating. The lowest prices on Pricewatch are almost always from disreputable resellers.

Changes in Pricewatch policy!!

[bstadil]

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.

The State of DVD

[Murdock037]

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.

The Great Bargain Rush

[JojoLinkyBob]

Yes, finding a good bargain online nowadays is like finding a piece of hay in a stack of needles.

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! :)

Arbitrage

[rlp]

arbitrage Attempting to profit by exploiting price differences of identical or similar financial instruments, on different markets or in different forms.

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.

The Online Used Book Market, ABE Books and eBay

[Nova Express]

I both buy and sell first edition science fiction, fantasy, horror and slipstream on both www.abebooks.com (as Lame Excuse Books) and occasionally on eBay (as lawrenceperson). With something like 8,500 other dealers on ABE, it's quite easy to find bargins, since you can compare by price. For reading copies of bestsellers, you can find many things at quarter-price or less. For really desirable first editions, the price of course will be higher, but 99% of the time you can usually find a rare book in nice condition for less than it would cost you at a local bookshop, assuming you can find it at all. (For a couple of random examples, there are currently five copies of H. P. Lovecraft's The Outsider and Others (the first Arkham House book) listed there, as well as eight hardback copies of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.)

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.)

Online comparison shopping vs. brick-and-mortar

[Scareduck]

Full disclosure: I am an employee of Pricegrabber, so you may make of that what you will. Nonetheless I still buy stuff online and offline like everyone else here.

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.

Ebay vs. Common Sense

[slaker]

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.

Re:Pay more for quality

[ncc74656]

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.

You never just buy from whoever has the cheapest Pricewatch entry. I've bought plenty of stuff from vendors who list their prices with Pricewatch, but I always cross-reference a vendor with its score at ResellerRatings to get a feel for whether the company in question is on the up-and-up. Since I've started checking prices this way, I've gotten reasonable prices and I've never been burned.

I had a set of scripts that would search Pricewatch for an item and ResellerRatings for vendor scores, and then merge the two together so that you'd get scores alongside prices. I'm not sure if it'd still work, since it relies on screen-scraping (HTML parsing, really) to extract data from the two websites. (A quick check indicated that the sites have changed enough that the scripts would need to be fixed.)

Re:pricescan seems to have better prices

[Spackler]

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.