Cyber Monday

According to The Gourmet Retailer, online sales are up 10% compared to last year see:  http://www.gourmetretailer.com/gourmetretailer/index.jsp.

According to the article, eBay was first followed by Amazon and Walmart in that order. In order to get a real feel for the health of sales, there are a couple of things we need to keep an eye out for; one is sales on Monday 15th, traditionally the peak day for online shopping and the rate of returns from the previous online purchases, tracking these into mid February. Often these are higher due to the non physical nature of the buying process, this is especially true for unplanned purchases of goods and/or services.

Searching for "the BBD"

In light of the buyer motivation being bigger, better deals, it is perhaps a good idea to research shopping comparison sites like uBid, BizRate or google shopping, I found a nice comparison chart on TopTenREVIEWS which has done a comparison of fairly well known sites. using a combination of these one can find a lower price or better shipping options. I have found that one or more sites tend to be better at certain categories.

The Social Media - helping the purchase process

In the past when one wanted to get an idea of the experience of someone who had already purchased a product, there were dedicated sites like epinions, consumerreports.org which gave a review of the product. Now, there are a multitude of options for example people comment on the product site itself on their experience with the product. I have found this particularly helpful on Amazon, where consumers offer their opinions of the product:

 

 

This is a great way of quickly finding out what other customers thought of the product, but I feel that when I am looking for a move review it should not be that the dvd was not shipped or that the format did not work, it should be about the movie itself. Hence I feel when a comment is added, one should choose a category and comments filtered by such categories definitely help the decision making process.

Now! -- while somewhat interactive in nature, this does not help one find substitutes, well actually you can navigate to the category and find out more options for water purifiers or golf bags. However a side by side comparison which is offered by a number of other vendors and is now offered as part of the amazon Amapedia....

 

 

Hopefully all this becomes part of one rich tapestry of shopping tools, these are as welcome as a pot of tea when we are picking for deals in these lean times. What I would also like to see is a more social editing review board much like Wikipedia but for products that can be hosted by a retailer or an independent org, much like yelp but with an editing and content management process like Wiki, with a edited synopsis and for the more adventurous or pricey items the ability to pursue all the comments by date, rank or category.

Lastly, maybe alerts to my email or blackberry on price reductions on items that are in my cart or wishlist!

 

Please let me know what you think of this article and if there are any more shopping tips for us who are mousing our way to better deals.