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

A fool and his money are soon parted.

[Tuxinatorium]

That explains everything. There are too many idiots on Ebay, and people too lazy to comparison shop.

Re:A fool and his money are soon parted.

[guinsu]

Actually, electronics consistently sell above retail if you are willing to put pictures and html in your auction (i.e. copy and past from the mfg's page for the product). I have a friend who consistently sells dvd players, digital cameras and other newer electronics for more than he paid for them.

Re:A fool and his money are soon parted.

[Anonymous Coward]

GREG'S 10 (because-it's-always-ten) LAWS OF EBAY

This is not a parody. I am, unfortunately, serious.

(1) A well maintained second-hand item is more valuable than the same
item brand new.

(2) 10% off list price is a deal--no matter that shipping costs
20% more.

(3) A picture is worth a thousand pennies.

(4) Feedback is more important than profit.

(5) Any item may be rented for the price of shipping one-way, but
BEWARE! Sometimes this may garner profit.

(6) It is better to pay 30% more and win a six-way bidding war than to
be the only bidder on another listing of an identical item.

(7) An item listed for $1 sells at $15. An item listed at $10
sells at $10.

(8) An unsorted collection "found in my attic" is more valuable than
one professionally appraised.

(9) Categories are for weenies.

(10) 90% of all items sold on eBay were previously sold on eBay.

Re:A fool and his money are soon parted.

[shayne321]

It should be obvious that only bidding in the closing minutes of the auction and only raising your bid the minimum amount would be the sensible thing to do and would get you a much better price than consistantly bidding and raising the price for several days.

Actually, there's an easier way than that to avoid paying outrageous prices for stuff on ebay.. When bidding simply figure out what the item is worth to YOU and put that in as your bid. Ebay will automatically raise your bid in the minimum increment as other people bid until they outbid what you're willing to pay. If that happens just move on to another auction... One thing I've found that helps is pick an odd amount for your maximum bid.. For example, if you're willing to pay $100 for something, enter your bid as $102. Most people will have $100 as their "too high" line and bow out of the bidding. I've won several auctions that way.

Shayne

Manufacturer price fixing

[s20451]

I've found consistently better prices on the web, even recently, than I have in-store for electronic goods

There was a related article in the NY times this week about electronics manufacturers who inflate their list prices so that retailers can easily offer their goods at a "bargain".

Re:Manufacturer price fixing

[Registered Coward v2]

Here is my axample, First they tell you their price (par for the course) then they tell you their markup from *their cost* (perhaps a note about cost of running the business, with a reference to their standard markup).

Then the markup would not be based on some artificial standard, but on a real hard dollar value of the product and the cost of getting it to the consumer. Then you would really know if your were getting a bargain or just their regular sale price. No hype, no sales pitch, just a smart business with informed customers.

The problems are:

1. There is no real direct link with price to cost, other than companies want the maximum margin possible. Pricing depends on what someone is willing to pay, not how much it costs to produce a product.

2. There is a point where the cost (time and money) of price shopping outweighs the savings. As a result, there is no real reason for companies to cut prices to the lowest possible point, since the chance taht they'l get an extra sale doesn't provide more additional revenue than a slightly higher price (and fewer sales).

A stores goal is to maximize their profit - not give you the best possible price.

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.

People shop online for convenience, not price

[aquarian]

That's the heart of the matter. Though a typical Slashdot user's online shopping probably consists of hunting down deals on RAM through Priceline, the average shopper is simply looking for convenience and selection. They're willing to pay a little more for it, too. This mirrors the rest of the catalog shopping world- which the online shopping world is just another part of. And surprise, the online winners, with very few exceptions, are the same companies who have been doing mail order successfully for the last 20 years- Lands End, LLBean, etc.

Re:People shop online for convenience, not price

[Anonymous Coward]

Conveninece is an understatement. Most people aren't going to buy things online yet for several reasons:

* You can't touch them. Would you buy a mattress online, for instance?
* You don't necessarily get enough information.
* It's harder to return.
* It's not necessarily cheaper, either.
* Searching for a product all to often yields too many results, not to few, most of which aren't relevant.

E-Commerce, ebusiness, e-whatever... It's a really fancy, sophistacted modern day catalog ordering system.

From my POV, good riddance.

[Pinball Wizard]

The online bargains were another symptom of the dot-coms that are mostly gone now. They were there because these people would do just about anything to bring people to their web sites. In other words, they lost money on every sale but made up for it in volume.

The death of these businesses has been a good thing for my online bookstore, which is an addition to a business that has been around for twenty years. Now we can reasonably compete with fair prices, whereas before it was hard because of all the damn giveaways and businesses selling merchandise at a loss.

Its not a good thing for the economy in general if you have a bunch of businesses blowing through venture capital by selling their merchandise at a loss or giving it away. But that was the business plan for a great many merchants trying to establish themselves online. Good riddance, I say.

Re:From my POV, good riddance.

[Jeremi]

No, it's not bad for the economy in general. It's bad for the stupid venture capitalists, and good for the consumers. It all evens out.

It's bad for businesses based on a sustainable business model (because they can't compete with products given away at a loss). Soon after it is bad for consumers, because (a) the dot-com is out of business (for obvious reasons), and (b) the competition is also out of business (they couldn't compete and make a profit). At this point, the only place the consumer can buy from is the MegaCorps that were able to afford to compete at a loss for a long time. Now the MegaCorp can raise its prices as much as it likes, since it has no surviving competition.

here are so many idiots with lots of money out there, maybe I should start selling miraculous "herbal medicine" (aka grass) on eBay. There's nothing wrong with exploiting morons. They're morons, it's their own fault for buying that crap.

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.

Where Did All The Online Bargains Go?

[Rayonic]

To JCPenny this Saturday and Sunday!

Everything in the store is marked down 0.05%!

(no, that is not a typo)

Sounds about right...

[xonker]

You can still get some decent deals on line (Computergeeks.com, anyone?) but overall you're not going to save a great deal on the MSRP online -- unless you're bargain hunting or the site is running a promotion.

Companies finally realized that they can't survive on razor-thin and non-existant margins. The stores that thrive on the 'Net will be ones that offer things that can't be easily found locally -- like the stuff at PCMods, ThinkGeek and all kinds of collector goods. It's also easier to set up a distribution system online for products that don't have a wide appeal, so only producing and shipping a small number makes sense. (Computer badges come to mind...)

Playing the pricing game doesn't really help in the long run -- the stores don't make enough to survive, and it hurts the companies who make the products. If people get used to the idea, for example, that they can buy Red Hat at cost they'll be reluctant to pay full price -- ever. If online stores run enough promotions, people simply learn to wait for the next deep discount instead of buying when they want the product.

I still prefer to do my shopping for many things online (books, computer parts) but I'd rather browse when looking for CDs or clothing.

price and perceived value.

[Alien54]

In other words, the market of potential buyers is growing, but prices are leveling off. Wood postulates that the market "depth" is increasing, meaning the Internet is attracting more -- and more sophisticated -- buyers and sellers. The result is that prices quickly reach the optimal market level, and items rarely go for much above or below that price point.

I can remember a lady at a coffee shop who started selling more cakes of a specific kind when she raised the price. Same product. The perception of the product was that it must not be any good if it was being sold cheaply, but it was alright if it came close to the expected price point.

Of course, with databases, etc, you can quickly find the optimal price point for almost any product online, from a sellers point of view.

Of course, experts know how to do better.

Re:price and perceived value.

[Registered Coward v2]

Diamonds/gold are expensive because they are rare

Actually, gold isn't rare, it just costs more to extract it from seawater than it's worth. Aluminium used to be more valuable than gold, but once a way was discovered (by two people, independently, at about the same time) to cheaply extract it from bauxite, its value dropped.

Diamond supply is similarly well controlled - primarily because the suppliers have more to gain by higher prices than by flooding the market.

Oil producers, however, stand to gain more by cheating on qoutas, which is why it's hard to maintain cartel prices.

And brunnete women are hotter in Sweden because the predominant feminine type there is blond.

Sounds like an arbitrage opportunitty - we ship you brunettes, you ship us blondes.

Why aren't there any bargains online?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about paying $30 for shipping a dimm? Maybe people got fed up with that shit. Lots of places have 'low prices' until you get to the checkout, and there's an ass-reaming shipping and handling charge. It's usually easy to tell: they won't quote shipping "until you finalize your order" because they know you won't bother. They hope to catch the "oops, I didn't read that" crowd.

Market stabalization

[standards]

Retailers just can't sell at a lost. Their is a lot of competition. In addition, product manufacturers can't sell items at a loss.

But when the market is in flux, all rules are off. Retailers may sell at a loss, and manufacturers might "dump" product onto the marketplace (in lieu of sending it to a landfill, as they often do).

With the Internet economy what it is, retailers aren't willing to sell at a loss for market share, and the tech economy is in a somewhat conservative state (for now).

So no agressive price cuts, but no outrageous prices.

Except for MS Office, of course.

Re:Canada. Ever consider...

[cperciva]

statehood?

Quite a few people have considered it. However, most Canadians have too much respect for human rights and international law to join a nation which routinely ignores both.

(And if Canada did merge with the US, it would do so as 13 new states, not as one. Without the unifying influence of being "not American" Canada would fall apart entirely.)

It's just evolution

[BlindSpot]

I see this as a sign that online shopping is starting to become less of a novelty and more of an everyday thing.

Lots of those online price breaks were to encourage people to try online shopping. As more and more people start to buy online, the need to offer incentives goes down and the need to actually profit from online business goes up. It's a classic ploy that even Homer Simpson recognized: "Get us addicted then jack up the price!"

As for the auction sites, it shows to me that sellers are starting to take them seriously. In the past people might have put up a bit of old junk to see how the auction site worked. If it sold for next to nothing, that was okay - chock it up to research. Now, sellers know there are people out there willing to pay for hard-to-find, high demand items, and they set their minimum bids accordingly.

Of course this quasi-recession we're in isn't helping matters, but I think that's only a small part of it. To me this is just the natural evolution of doing business online.

Market Trends

[Afreet1]

From what I have seen, the trends of online retailers seems to mimic their brick and mortar counterparts.

What I mean by this is that for high turnover items (moves fast into and off of the virtual shelves in terms of sales volume), like new software, DVDs, PS2 games and CD-R blanks, will be almost identically priced. In fact the real storefront is sometimes cheaper when you take taxes/shipping into account. (note: this doesn't take into account rebates)

For items that aren't as fast to sell like older computer hardware or even new hardware that has a fast obsolescence track, online stores have the advantage for their own savings since it doesn't cost them as much to store the old inventory. In some cases the retail environment will be in such a rush to get rid of the equipment they will drop prices a lot lower than they should, just to clear space. Couple this with the fact that as a full chain of stores they have better bargaining power with the manufacturers and can get lower initial prices.

What this means is that for normal transactions an online store can sell older stuff for cheaper and sustain that price, but when new product lines come out, the physical storefront may or may not have a greater discount, depending on how well they manager their warehouses.

Basically we are in a situation where all of the discounts of online business are lost on the items that we buy the most, and they no longer have a nest egg of excess cash to pay for significant price differences.

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.

Morons? Trolls running /. now?

[fleener]

The one thing that was missed is the ever-increasing number of morons who will pay full-retail price + 20% for things on eBay."

Bypassing the obvious trollish nature of the word "morons," allow me to educate you. People who live in rural areas cannot walk down to the corner Wal*Mart, Kmart or Target to buy cheap crap. Contrary to popular believe, box stores have not infiltrated every city and town yet. Some people have to drive 100 miles or 6 hours, whichever is more inconvenient.

Much of this cheap crap is not sold online, so these people must use sites like Ebay to buy products that are otherwise unavailable to them. Paying more on Ebay is cheaper than the alternative.

Re:Morons? Trolls running /. now?

[elmegil]

You mean the alternative of buying the product at full list (instead of full list + 20%) from an ONLINE RETAILER?

Who's the moron again?

eBayers will bid on anything, even an empty box!

[studboy]

There was a spate of people posting "XBox box"es on ebay -- the description clearly said "this is the box the XBox came in, the console is sold seperately." Now, I can see one or two people bidding or something, but these auctions, and there were quite a few, got over a *dozen* bids each! Into the several hundred dollar range! For an empty box!

This got a lot of press at fark.com, so people started posting spam auctions. One was for a normal carboard box with an X posted on it, saying "this is not an XBox". It went to $130 until ebay pulled it!

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.

Huh? Walmart is world's largest retailer, employer

[Ars-Fartsica]

Step outside your perspective and you'll see a nation of $35k earners who are religious WalMart shoppers. Why? Because its almost always the cheapest place to buy things. The stores are dumpy and the clientele dishevelled, but if were about something other than saving money, Amazon and Walmart would have changed places a long time ago.

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.)

I've been wondering the same thing

[abe ferlman]

I've been reading the sunday paper this morning in front of my computer with my digital convergence CueCat:, and I keep swiping the ads- no deals! What's up with that?

Oh well, at least I can still check the price of transistors at radio shack with my free barcode rea^H^H^H CueCat:!

I tried running my cuecat: across a printout of slashdot's website, and it took me to some weird goat site, not sure what's up with that...

Re:What ebay is good for..... avoiding microsoft t

[Oliver Defacszio]

It's also a wonderful place to get naked

Where isn't?

Bad Online Experiences

[Darth_Burrito]

I don't know about anyone else, but I've never trusted online bargains. Once I was trying to order some parts off of pricewatch and came across a series of companies that were lowering their prices at night when the store was closed and raising them when the stores opened. The only way to get the pricewatch price was to call and mention the current price. However there was no way to place an order over the phone when the store was closed. When I asked about getting last midnight's price, they refused and would not comment on their pricing scheme.

Another time, I tried ordering a computer kit online (pricewatch), I was about to give him my credit card number when he suggested I upgrade to their special CPU cooler which was "better" than the one that came with their product. I asked him if there was something wrong with the cpu cooler that came with it and he said that while the cpu cooler that came with it was perfectly good, it only consisted of a fan. I spoke with him a few minutes to try and figure out exactly what he meant and determined the actual cpu cooler included in his 1.33GHz Athlon kit was somehow without a heatsink. Click.

Yet another time, in a fit of insanity, I decided to order a new video card online saving about $60. Everything went smoothly, I ordered from a company in California for about $270 (US). A week and a half later, it arrived with a return address somewhere in Brazil. I have no idea what I would of had to do had the product been defective (thank god it wasn't), but I'm sure it would have been hell.

Perhaps, bad experiences online have driven consumers away from these vendors and forced the online retailers to raise prices. Maybe most of the bargains out there never really existed anyway. As a kid scrounging for money to buy stuff, it sometimes makes sense. As a professional with a decent salary, buying online often isn't worth the risk.

Re:Auctions implosion coming

[haruharaharu]

if the seller buying stuff at Fry's and turning it for a profit is making it available to people who don't have access to the temple that is Fry's (me, for example), why shouldn't he be entitled to make money doing it?

Didn't you just describe a distributor? This isn't profiteering, it's just normal business. Profiteering would be those Coke machines that tied the price to the temperature.

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.