The Power of Online Shopping
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DEALS! DEALS! DEALS! DEALS!
Convenient and expansive. We buy clothes, printers, games, music, food and electronics from the internet. Name it and you can find it for cheap.
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Buy this fresh iPhone case on Amazon for $10 while wearing your big-ass fur coat you bought on eBay.
You can find a tweed blazer for that "Professors and Schoolgirls" theme party for a cool $18 while you're still wearing that beer-stained button down and khaki combo from the previous night. I recently bought an Olympus PEN E-PL1 micro four-thirds camera with the lens included on Amazon for $202.99 instead of the $500 it cost originally. I even bought a 40-150mm zoom lens (usually $300) and an electronic viewfinder (usually $179) for it combined $315.67, bringing my total just $18.67 over what the camera alone would have cost me if I had bought it when it first came out. First released in 2008, the Micro Four Thirds (MFT) system standard allows for a camera that is compact like a point and shoot while having better image quality and interchangeable lenses like a DSLR.
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source: Austin Allen |
Truth is, I wasn't even looking to buy a camera when I bought the EPL-1 on March 10. Now, how did I get such a good deal on this camera without even trying? Sites like gdgt and Amazon have price watching features that allow you to track items for a long period of time. Back in the summer of 2009, the Olympus released the PEN E-P1, its first MFT camera, and I wanted it so bad. The styling of the EP-1, like many MFTs and all previous PEN cameras, harked back to 35mm SLRs and half-frames of the forties, fifties and sixties. However, the $800 price tag and no built-in flash or viewfinder made my 17 year old heart sink. So, I logged on to gdgt.com and added the camera to my 'I Want It' section.
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Gdgt offers a few main services that work to push the site as a tech consumers ultimate guide. To help consumers gain information and perspective on specific products, each gadget page has six sections: reviews, specs, answers, discussions, buy it and 90-day price history. 'Reviews' features a combination of critic reviews (from gdgt writers and other tech site writers) and user reviews, while the functions of the 'Specs,' 'Answers,' 'Discussions,' 'Buy It' and '90-Day Price History' sections are pretty analogous to their titles. Gdgt also allows for users to save gadgets to their personal profiles into one of three sections: 'I Have It,' 'I Want It' and 'I Had It'. Users can build up a personal collection of all of their past gadgets, and follow gadgets they want, getting alert emails when the price drops. Gdgt ties in nicely with Amazon, which also allows its users to get price drop emails on all Amazon approved products.
The Glory of Price Alerts
When I got an alert email this March that the EP-1 had dropped in price, I check out the email, to find that it listed a similar camera, the EPL-1, at a reduced price. I check out Amazon, checked my savings, and found that it was the right time to make a camera investment. Price Alerts help you be the Macklemore of online shopping, except for you don't have to try as hard.
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Note: AOL bought gdgt.com and combined gdgt and engadget. If you already had a gdgt profile, it will rolled over to engadget
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