Online Shopping Comparison--Where To Find Deals, Selection And Convenience

Low Price Guarantees

The highly competitive nature of this industry has led the Big Three to make very similar low price guarantees. In essence, each of the Big Three promises if you find the same item advertised for less by another office superstore within seven days of your purchase--and you jump through the appropriate verification process--the store in question will give you the lower price plus 55 percent (up to about $50) of the difference. I really worked to try to take advantage of this offer. I searched for hours trying to find a big price difference and finally found a Hewlett Packard Scanner for $49 less. However, when I read the fine print, I learned most of the expensive goodies such as printers and laptops were excluded from this offer. Furthermore, auction sites didn't apply. Since most of us are unwilling to spend a few hours trying to save a dime on sticky notes, I would humbly suggest you disregard these lures.

Shopping An Internet Auction

Internet auctions are intriguing for a number of reasons. Like all auctions, they can be quite exciting when you beat out the other bidders and there's a tendency to become emotionally involved. The difficulty with Internet auctions, however, is it's impossible to inspect the goods before you buy. Maybe this is why the Federal Trade Commission has noted consumer fraud is rampart in this domain. When shopping for my antivirus software, I visited Egghead.com and entered an auction. I bid on some Norton Antivirus software I had seen advertised at the Big Three for about $29. The Egghead site said this was new software and little else, except that Egghead recommended the high bid not exceed $45. I thought this was misleading when the software could be had for considerably less elsewhere. I won the auction for a little less than retail, and to my surprise, I didn't receive a boxed version of the software. Rather, I received an OEM copy designed for distribution with new computers sold in Latin America. This is a problem because it virtually eliminates the potential to later resell the software.