Cyber Monday

Now that the craziness of Black Friday and Thanksgiving weekend is behind us, we can all get back to work. Now the time is to shop online. Today is what online retailers and the media have started calling this online shopping craze “Cyber Monday” – when the online retailers put up the special deals.

Use Comparison Shopping Search Engines
These shopping engines, such as Bizrate.com, Shopping.com, Shopzilla and others pull data from a wide variety of stores and vendors and compare by price. If you enter your zip code, the systems usually compute tax and shipping, which can make a big difference on larger ticket items. It pays to pay $15 in shipping, if you are saving $80 by not having to pay tax. New Yorkers are now being penalized and being forced to pay a use tax, regardless of where an item is bought. Note that if your search engine keeps coming back with the same seven or eight results, you know it’s only listing stores and companies who pay to be listed.

Watch the Ratings of Each Online Retailer
A critical factor of these search engines is the rating of the website and company. NEVER EVER buy from a company with a very bad rating here. The goal is to buy from the cheapest of the reputable companies. Don’t assume that if a company is listed on a shopping search engine that it has been properly vetted and checked out. Often companies with ratings of 1 or 2 (out of 5) have serious problems. Some use bait and switch. After you order, you get notified that the product is no longer available – and a “replacement suggestion” is offered. Other companies will try to have you purchase expensive package deals or warrantees – or suddenly the super deep discount is no longer available.

Be Careful of Fraud
There is worse, however, I once was shopping for an integrated computer/TV and I used a comparison shopping search engine. It had one company listed which was $600 below everyone else. I didn’t believe it was real, so I searched for information about the company. What I found shocked me. After someone placed a credit card order, he was notified by the company that the website business had been sold and that the credit card system was being switched over. To purchase the product, the buyer was told he had to send a bank wire to Spain. I notified the comparison shopping site about this obvious fraud and received back an automated reply that the company has a rating system, so over time they remove low performers. I responded that this wasn’t a “low performer” with just poor customer service. This was outright fraud. I never heard back, but hopefully my emails reached the right people.

Loyalty Does Not Pay Online
We like being loyal customers. And usually we feel appreciated as loyal customers. Online this is no longer true. Companies change prices depending on who you are and how you shop, and you are likely to get a better deal from the same company shopping around, then buying as a loyal customer. I was looking for a large 24” monitor, so I compared a few brand and one of them was Dell (which I ended up buying and love). In my Google searching, I typed in the model number looking for product reviews. I also clicked on the Dell link to see the price. As it turned out, all the monitors had a $100 sale that day. The next day I just went to my Dell account online – since I have bought close to 50 computers from Dell for my businesses over the past 13 years. When I got there, I seemed to have lost my $100 off deal. Later I realized that I only got that deal since I searched the actual model number on Google. So I did that again – and found the $100 discount – which wasn’t available to me as a loyal customer.

In another case, I had purchased software from a company (initially through a comparison shopping engine) and the customer service was excellent, so when I needed to buy another copy, I went directly to the site. Just for fun, I checked the comparison engine before I purchased. I was not intending to switch companies as this was a tricky software purchase where the customer service was important to me. I just wanted to see the price. Imagine how surprised I was when I saw the same product from the same company I was buying from – for 15% cheaper.

Overall – Most Companies Are Fine
While prudence and common sense should prevail, most companies, including the smaller ones are fine. It is still much more dangerous giving your credit card to a waiter that it is shopping online