Most people should consider doing
more of their shopping on the Internet. You can buy
almost anything you need online: groceries, appliances,
cars and almost any luxury you can imagine.
Let's suppose you transferred one shopping trip per week onto the
Internet (let's round this down to 50 trips per year.) If
your average round-trip drive is 10 miles, you'll save $200
per year on the 500 miles driven (assuming 40¢ per mile
expenses.)
You can usually find an easy-to-use coupon for
about $10 off at almost any online store, at sites such as DealOfDay.com:
use one of those per week and you'll save another
$500. There are also online shopping agents that can
make sure you get rock-bottom prices. You'll probably save at least 10%
that way: a study on Internet bargains by two professors at M.I.T. university concluded that bargain-shopping on the
Internet saves consumers from 9% to 16%.
If you move $5000 worth of spending online each year, you'll receive about
$500 in savings.
You can also save time by shopping online. Let's say that your average shopping trip is 1.5
hours long. Moving it onto the Internet will save you about one
hour per shopping trip, because you won't have to drive your car or walk
the aisles of the store. That's worth another $500 per
year for someone making $10 per hour. Shipping costs will raise the price of online
shopping by about 5-10%, but most people will get that back in
sales-tax savings because most online stores charge a sales
tax only for the state where they are located.
If you want to try to save even more money, visit auction sites such
as eBay.com: they
sell both new and refurbished items at a steep discount, and you can also
buy from many private sellers of used goods.
The more costly the item you wish to purchase, the more important it is to shop for it
online. That's true because the Internet is a great
tool to research prices: you can use the Internet to
force suppliers to compete for your business and get the best
price. You can also save
money on expensive purchases by avoiding the state sales tax.
Read the articles in this section, and you won't have to worry about being
gypped by some of the fly-by-night outfits that inhabit the Web...
Use Shopping Agents To Find The Best Price
Shopping agents try to find the best prices for many kinds of
products. We did a quick search for "best shopping agents" at
Google, and most of the results returned MySimon.com. That's
been the shopping agent we've generally used. It has extensive price
comparisons, dozens of product guides from Consumer Reports and
it's easy to use.
PC Magazine recently rated PriceGrabber.com as the
best Shopping Agent, half a star above MySimon. PriceGrabber doesn't
have MySimon's product guides, but it does have a lot of user-created product
reviews (much like Amazon.com.) It lists more stores, and it
has categories for both products and
services (such as travel and cell phones.) It does well at incorporating
coupons and rebates into the site, giving you another way to save money.
Many Web sites and computer magazines
have come out with their own rankings of the best online stores. Over
the years, the site that's fulfilled this mission most consistently is
BizRate.com. They've
been evaluating Internet retailers for longer than anyone else, and
they do a fine job of giving you all the details you need to know.
They gather over a million consumer surveys each month to find out what
people really think about various online stores. A store's policies for returns and warranties are especially
important, because you'll be ordering products "sight unseen."
Here's how to use shopping agents:
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Shop Smarter And Save Big Bucks 
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Time to complete:
| A few minutes per product search |
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Money you'll spend:
| $0 |
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What you'll get:
| Price comparisons for many different items |
Step-by-step instructions:
- Visit a shopping agent such as
MySimon.com.
- Type in a search term (e.g. "boombox"). Optionally, you
can select a category.
- The results page will show a few results. To see a wider
selection, click on the link labeled "See all boomboxes..." (or whatever
it is you search for). Impressively, they even calculate the shipping
and sales tax for you!
- After you've decide what you want, search for the same product
at PriceGrabber.com
and/or BizRate.com to see if
you can get a better deal, check how well the merchants are rated and read
reviews of online stores by actual customers.
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Further Reading:
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