Shopping via the Internet

I use the internet to shop frugally all the time. In fact, if you don’t use bargain sites (like woot.com, and  PriceGrabber.com ), you are missing out on potentially big savings.

Then there are sites like Craigslist and Ebay that offer great deals, or in eBay’s case, hard to find items that may be impossible to find otherwise (for example, trying finding: “The Hootin Hollow Haunted House” at Walmart)!

Often in the cases of the big stores with many physical locations, you can use the internet to find something at a remote store, and have it delivered to you at your local store shipping free!  It’s a great savings to you.

There are other ways to optimize buying online as well, but today I’m going to mention an uncommon method that my friends and I sometime use to buy things in sharp demand during the Christmas season!  First, as you well know, the hard to get gifts are posted on ebay but often at a premium.  The markup can get kind of crazy via ebay actually…  My friends and family use a cheaper solution!

System Used by Family, Friends and Neighbors:

• We use the internet to locate any shipment of the “hard to get” product (sometime even calling a store, and asking them to check their inventory online system) that one of us is interested in.
• Next, we go call that store and ask if they can put the item on hold for a few hours.
• Then we call the  friend that lives close to that store and ask them to purchase the item.
• Finally, depending on the distance of where the friend lives, we either have our friend ship it via a postal service, or coordinate a picking the item up the next time we get together for lunch or dinner…

I know the 4 steps above doesn’t see like much, but it is!  The alternative would be tor keep trying for days to get the item from stores in the area, or pay a huge premium on ebay…

Readers, do you have an optimal system you’d like to share?

-MR

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