Hello my Friends.
Today we'll focus on to where to find some good offers to purchase some goods we need. Since the most convenient way for online payments is a credit or a debit card, the most online webstores use this way to get their payments.
But is it in our benefit to give our credit card number in online stores even if they use secure Payment Gateways? Well, hard to say! I personally, prefer to use a prepaid debit card (or a gift card) and make all of my transactions through a Payment Processor like Paypal.
That way we have a two layer protection. One because limited funds are available for each transaction, and second because of the independant Payment Processor.
Having these in mind let's see what we can do to locate the cheapest prices online! Where to start from? Internet is so big and online stores are countless! Well, not exactly.
I'm afraid that we'll have to limit down our research to some tens of them, for practical and security reasons, for each product category.
I'll give an example on this.
e.g. twenty (20) stores for shoes, or thirty (30) stores for men's clothes are usually more than enough.
A good idea is to start looking at some sites that they compare the prices of online stores. There are many websites of this kind, but the downside is that usually are compatible with a limited number of webstores.
Usually, using about 4-5 Price Comparing websites is more than enough and the most competitive price should be in our knowledge in a limited time. A short list of this kind of websites are below:
1. http://www.bizrate.com
2. http://www.pricegrabber.com
3. http://www.nextag.com
4. http://www.sortprice.com
5. http://www.shopzilla.com
6. http://www.smarter.com
7. http://www.hookprice.com
You will amazed by how much differ the prices by one webstore to another! Differences of 10-30% are common for the vast majority of the goods! It's incredible but true and has to do, mostly, with the ''supplier's chain''. The most close to the manufacturer a website is the cheaper can sale their products!
O.K We have the cheapest deal in our hands, can we now go shopping? Well, not exactly. I recommend you to first make a quick search at ebay, because sometimes you can find an even better deal over there and save an additional 10-20%! Unfortunately this cannot be done for all items, else all they would make purchases only at ebay!
So, at that point we have locate the cheapest price online and the webstore that this is available. Next step is to check the reliability of this website. We can't just trust each and every webstore, just because it happened to have it's items listed in a price comparison script! Furthermore, too low prices may make us skeptical...
I still remember some years ago a well known and established webstore to make some insane offers one day and vanished with it's customers money the next! It's a rare situation, but really frustrating if it happens to you.
To have a global overview of a webstore i recommend this website: http://www.resellerratings.com
You can find many reviews over there for almost sixty thousants (60,000) webstores! If you have locate a webstore that is not listed there or have no reviews yet, well i'll say it pretty simple, Do Not Even Bother! There are too many possibilities to get scammed...
Tip: When researching for a website look for the latest comments and reviews.
O.K That was all for today, until next time bye-bye.
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