The Denver-Life.com shopping guide

So we were talking the other night about our shopping habits, and thought it might be fun to throw up a post related to how we get deals on items, especially in this holiday season. Let me preface this with the fact that Meredith and I hate to pay full price for anything. Maybe I didn’t emphasize that well enough—we HATE it. Consequently we are always on the lookout for ways to get what we want for cheaper. Granted, if you’re looking for where to search for product reviews, that will have to be another topic, as this post is more directed to shopping for a particular item (or at least a group of items). We aren’t experts by any stretch of the imagination, but here’s what we know.

First, keep a list. I actually really like to use the “Wish List” function on www.amazon.com. I rarely actually buy the item there, but it helps me to keep tabs on what I’m searching for. It’s also accessible from work, home, etc. Another side effect of keeping the list on Amazon is that Amazon can make recommendations for other items that you might like, which can actually get pretty darn good. As a big DVD/CD/Video Game fan, I’m also constantly on the lookout for new releases that I want to own. Generally speaking, you can’t beat Best Buy/Circuit City on deals for the first week of release, so I keep track of the release dates of the items I want so I can run out there and grab them that week (often saving $5 or more on a new DVD, and $3 or more on a new CD). Other places to find cheap DVDs if you missed the release week are www.overstock.com and www.deepdiscountdvd.com. The latter site usually has free shipping, making it an even more attractive deal.

Second, and heavily related to the first item, is to write down the item when you see it in a store. I carry a PDA (I know…I’m a nerd), and when we see something in a store that we are interested in, we write down all we can find out about it. After all, it’s generally pretty tough to get the results you want from google if you type in “black shoe.” Get the brand name (as specific as you can—Kenneth Cole and Kenneth Cole Reaction are actually 2 different lines), style, color (if applicable—oh, and while we’re on the topic of shoes, be sure to get the specific color name if you can—often shoes that look like they’re just brown sell in multiple shades of brown, so you could be confused if you go to buy online).

Next, search the web for your item to see if there’s a better deal to be had. We have several websites that we use to search for deals, and if I’m shopping for something important, I use all of them. Here’s the list:
www.mysimon.com www.shopping.com www.shopzilla.com www.nextag.com www.pricescan.com www.pricegrabber.com
Of those websites, I think shopping.com and pricegrabber.com are my favorites, for the ease of use and variety of products that they have. If any of those fail, go back to faithful old www.google.com and www.yahoo.com. On those sites, you can/should search in 2 ways: first, with the conventional search bar, and then using their shopping searches (Google calls theirs Froogle, and it can be found by typing the name into the box, hitting “More>>” at the top right of the search box, and then hit “Froogle”. Yahoo’s is much more direct…type it in, hit the shopping word above the box, and then submit your search). You’ll often find smaller sellers that undercut a lot of the bigger dealers that way.
After finding a variety of websites/locations to buy your item (or even if you can only find one), now it’s time to search for coupons. If you’ve got some time to wait, get on the mailing list for the site you’re trying to buy from. For example, www.ebags.com sends out emails nearly weekly to advertise free shipping, dollar amounts and percentages off—if you’ve got the time to wait, they’ll send you a deal. Incidentally, as a slight detour, one of my favorite things to do is earn coupons from www.e-rewards.com. They’ve saved me a lot of money too, as I’ve gotten hundreds of dollars worth of magazine subscriptions, coupon codes, etc. just from doing surveys on their website. They don’t pay cash, but the surveys are usually easy to do, so why not? So back to coupons…look around the web to see if you can find coupons for the website/store you’re trying to buy from. Some good websites to look at are www.wow-coupons.com, www.couponmountain.com, and www.amazing-bargains.com. If you have no luck there, why not look for a store coupon (or gift card someone’s trying to unload) on eBay? Lastly, there are sites that use traffic to gain revenue, so they pay you a percentage of the cost of the item you buy if you click through their site to get to the other one. A good example of that is ecoupons.com (if you’re going to use this one, please use the link in the left sidebar—it counts as a referral for me that way)—it took 60 days, but I got a check back for an item that we bought.

Finally, keep your eyes peeled and be patient. If you like something enough, you’ll find a way to get it cheaper. Going back to Amazon, we’ve done a few things to get more out of the site. Using shoes again as an example, Amazon is trying exceptionally hard to get into the shoe sales business, so they have been offering $20 off of an $80 shoe purchase from their site (make sure the shoes ship from Amazon though), and then the Oprah book club offers 10% off on shoes and other items as well. That essentially means that you can get $80 worth of shoes for $54 with free shipping. An excellent tool that I found on the web for Amazon too is the Amazon Price Watch, found at http://www.frozenwarrior.com/~pricewatch/ . This ingenious little tool tracks item prices and if they drop, the website emails you. This can work for you in 2 ways. First, you can watch the price of something you’ve not yet bought. Second, you can (and should) watch the price of an item you just barely bought at Amazon. They have something like a 30 day price guarantee on their own products, so if you see the price drop, you can email them and they’ll refund the difference (it does actually work too—I’ve gotten back money on a DVD that they put on sale about a week after I bought it).

Well anyway, this has been a longwinded post, but hopefully it’s been useful. As a parting statement, here is a listing of some of the sites we haunt around the very most in search of great web deals, aside from the ones we already mentioned:

www.6pm.com – shoe/purse site (sister site of ebags.com). They feature a 110% price guarantee (on the web that’s pretty darn good) as well as free shipping both ways (so you can try a size on, and if it doesn’t fit, they email you a fedex label to return it). www.zappos.com is another decent shoe site, but their stuff seems pricier (though the selection is different, so it's still worth a look).

www.buy.com – These guys want to be amazon.com so bad that it isn’t even funny. In wanting that, though, their prices generally undercut Amazon’s (especially on books), and their free shipping actually comes pretty quickly, which is more than I can say for many other sites. Also, these days they’re doing a Google checkout promotion, where if you buy anything from them (directly…not one of their associated merchants) and spend more than $30, they’ll take $10 off. Not bad.

www.hotdlz.com – My friend showed me this one, and it’s a really great site. If you’re looking for something in particular, this isn’t the site for you, but their deals are amazing (similar to slickdeals.net).

www.pricewatch.com – This is where computer junkies like me get parts/supplies. They’re a search engine for stuff, and they’re really good too. They saved me several hundred dollars when I built my computer a couple of years ago, and I continue to shop individual upgrade parts there too.

Enjoy!
Steve