Christmas Gifts, delivered!

It's that time of year again - the malls are packed, the Walmarts are over-run, and the lines in every store are longer than usual. Save yourself the headache and consider sending your friends and loved ones something special using the internet. I have given or received something from each of these companies and highly recommend them all. I'm sure there are lots more websites that offer shipping to recipients, these are just my favorites.

• Omaha Steaks: Offers scrumptious meat and side dishes. You can choose delivery date and it arrives in a styrofoam cooler with dry ice. Their steaks are more than scrumptious!
• Hickory Farms: Offers snack foods such as sausages, cheeses, spreads, etc. Best purchased in a gift basket.
• Harry & David: Harry & David offer some of the most delicious gourmet Christmas time treats. They're well known for their pears and other fruits but they offer all sorts of other goodies for Christmas time.
• Gift Baskets from 1800-flowers: Take the unusual route and send your friends and family a centerpiece for their Christmas dinner table. They also have yummy looking gift baskets!
• Gourmet Gift Baskets: It's all in the name! They have probably the widest variety of themed gift baskets I've ever seen.
• QVC: QVC carries just about everything under the sun! Home decoration, personal products, apparel, kitchenware, yummy food goodies, interesting gadgets, and more! I've purchased many things from QVC and everything has been a quality product worthy of the price. Hint: don't wait around for the right thing to come on TV - they have a website full of items for purchase.
• HSN: HSN is the same idea as QVC - everything under the sun! You're sure to find something for everyone.
• Jewelry Television: A great company selling quality jewelry and gemstones at affordable prices.
• Gems TV: My favorite resource for jewelry! Their TV program uses a very unique concept: reverse auctions! The longer the current item remains in stock, the lower the price goes. And when it's all over, everyone pays the lowest price! I've seen some truly gorgeous gemstones and artisan work on their programs. You can follow along with their TV program on the website or they have other games on the website alone. All jewelry is hand cut and handmade by Gems TV, to maintain a high standard of quality.

I heard on the radio on my way to class this afternoon that today's the biggest day of the year for online shopping! That means there will be lots of sales - hop to it!

If you're shipping gifts this year, please make sure your gifts arrive on time! Here's the schedule of shipping days from USPS and Fedex for your reference.

Special Topic for College Students

I know it’s far too late in the semester for this to be useful now, but Spring 2008 semester is right around the corner after the holidays. I usually try to rent my textbooks at a little shop in Kennesaw, but occasionally they don’t have the books I need available to rent. On our campus, getting in and out of the bookstore is a nightmare! I only go there as a very last resort. This semester I decided to poke around and see if I couldn’t find my textbooks at a more convenient place. Turns out, not only was it more convenient, but it was way cheaper too!

If you’ve ever frequented Amazon.com, sometimes you might notice the item you’re looking at actually ships from a different vendor than Amazon itself. There are third party sellers on Amazon.com who take advantage of the large selling community. Sometimes you can find more obscure items this way, without having to fight over an auction on eBay. That’s how I found the textbooks for the English class I am taking this semester. When I checked out the school bookstore’s website, it said the books were currently unavailable. I didn’t want to trek over to the store to come out empty handed so I did a Google search for the title and author. Lo’ and behold – they appeared on Amazon! So I poked around through the 3^rd party vendors and found the best deal – low price, high quality – on each of the books I needed. With shipping per book, it all came out to less than $20 – which is what one of them would have cost me through the school bookstore!

You just have to be careful when purchasing textbooks through outside sources – pay very close attention to the edition needed and the edition for sale. Sometimes drastic changes can be made from one edition to another. The easiest way to make sure you have the right book is to use the ISBN number. This number is unique to that specific publication. Just copy and paste the ISBN number from the school provided list into either a Google search or an Amazon.com search field. That way you’ll know for sure it’s the right title, author, and edition.

Hope that helps you save a little bit of dough this coming semester.  Remember, you can save a lot of time and money if you just know what you’re looking for!

Get your daily shopping fix!

For true bargain hunters, a new concept in online shopping has sprung up in recent years. Daily deal websites have become hugely popular recently due in part to the fun “winning” nature and the great deals they offer. The idea is the website offers up one item of limited quantity each day at a ridiculously low price. Some sites will sell anything; others specialize in some type of item (electronics, or cookware for example). I’ve also noticed they all have very reasonable shipping prices. If there’s something you’d like to have, but are willing wait for just the right price, keep yours eyes on the daily deal sites. It only takes a few minutes each day to check all of them to see if they happen to be offering what you’re looking for. Alternatively, if you just like to get a really good deal, check them out on occasion – one just might be selling something you didn’t know you needed! Often these sites have discussion forums so you can get opinions from people who have used the item up for sale. Additionally, most sites keep an archive  of what items they had for sale on previous days, just in case you’re curious what you missed.

• Woot! – One of the most popular sites and often focuses on electronics and other nifty gadgets. They have other branches such as wine.woot.com and shirt.woot.com, too. They provide pictures, full descriptions, and specifications for each item. If you’ve got the guts, they sometimes offer a mystery bundle called “bag of crap” and apparently the items inside aren’t crap after all because it always sells out like hot cakes!
• Yugster – Another very popular site. A review I read for this site says that Yugster sometimes offers a “second chance” offer after the first daily deal has sold out.
• Maczot – For the fellow Mac users out there. This site has software bundles for the Mac user. This is extremely helpful because often it’s difficult to find discounted software for the Macintosh platform. Occasionally they offer a mystery bundle of software at a ridiculously low price. If you’ve got the guts to buy a mystery package, you could end up with some great software at a ridiculously low price.
• ShirtADay - This site offers a different t-shirt design everyday. There's a small difference in their pricing though - as the day progresses and more people make purchases, the price of the t-shirt drops! Technically buyers pay a starting price, and get a refund at the end of the day after the discount has been determined. Often the t-shirts are decorated with a funny blurb, popular among the younger crowd. Typically shirts like these sell for $15 or more in stores or online. Most designs are about $10 plus shipping, and they even offer bigger sizes up to XXXL (for a few extra bucks, that is). Additionally, they have a clearance section for all the designs that haven't sold out 100%. Only select sizes are available under the clearance section, though! I think the best part of this site is the past shirts and potential shirts sections where visitors can vote for their favorite designs. The data from these polls help the crew decide which t-shirts designs to offer.

If you don’t have the time to visit each and every deal a day site (there are hundreds now!) there are great “roundup” sites that put the deals from a bunch of different sites all onto one site. I won’t review them all, because honestly I haven’t used them all. But here is a list for you:

·      Deal of the Day

·      Bargain Jack

·      Deal Sucker

·      Zero Day Deals

·      Froomb

·     Today's Deal of the Day

Phishing and Spying

         Today’s topic actually applies to general email and Internet usage, but it is very important and ties into personal and financial safety. Internet criminals have found a way to take advantage of users of popular shopping websites through email. Such emails are referred to as “phishing." They imitate the icons and format of popular websites and attempt to obtain very personal information from you to use to steal your identity or your money. They do it through both links to their website or a form embedded in an email. Because of this it is very important to never provide personal information including login names and passwords through an email. Additionally, never click on links in emails, always type the address into the location field of your Internet browser.

         Along a similar line, a lot of websites deposit harmful or sneaky software on your computer as you visit their site and surf around the Internet. These are called spyware and often report to an external entity what you do on your computer. Sometimes individual programs can be quite harmful, and if you get too many of these sneaky programs on your system, it will slow it down and make it buggy. It is very important to prevent the installation of these programs and clean out the ones that manage to get through. The easiest way to prevent these is to limit the use of cookies and pop-up ads. Also the various “Toolbar” accessory software are often major contributors to the problem (Google and Yahoo are just a couple examples). As helpful as they may seem, they are spyware, so beware. To clean these programs off there are a few major reputable programs: Spybot Search & Destroy, Ad-Aware, AVG Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware and CCleaner. It is important to use a couple different programs because they all detect different things. Additionally, it’s important to understand that these programs can only detect and remove spyware that they know of. If you manage to pick up something they don’t know about yet, then there’s no way for these programs to detect it or remove it. Companies develop new spyware every day and these programs must update their databases to account for each of these new spyware programs. Before running a scan, you should remember to download these updates. The average Internet user needs to run a scan at least once a week to keep up with the accumulation of these programs. There’s one other thing to be concerned about with regard to this cleansing process. There are companies in existence who have taken advantage of the “spyware craze” and takes advantage of the uneducated browser. If you ever see a pop-up in your browser about a website offering a free scan for harmful software, ignore it! If you click on this, it will likely actually install a bunch of spyware software instead of removing them for you.

         So there are wonderful things about shopping online, and there’s a few things you need to consider. Ultimately, the Internet is a wonderful invention and I wouldn’t be able to live without it. Happy shopping, and stay safe out there!

Protecting You and Your Credit

When paying for eBay purchases Paypal offers quite a few options for protecting your financial information. Instead of sending your bank account information or credit card information to every seller, Paypal will transfer money between sellers and buyers. It lets you use both bank transfers and credit cards for payment. Additionally, if you end up in a bad deal with a seller you can dispute the transaction with Paypal and most of the time they will return your money if the seller refuses to cooperate. If you pay using a credit card you can also dispute the charge with your credit card company. A lot of smaller websites use Paypal for payment services also because of the simplicity for online merchants.

         When you’re making purchases through online stores be sure to read their privacy policy closely. You don’t want to do business with a company that doesn’t take your privacy and financial security seriously. Additionally, when entering personal information you should look for the form encryption icon. Every browser is different, but the help section in your browser should be able to explain how to tell if a form is encrypted. Most importantly, never ever enter any private information into a web form that you’re unsure of.

         When making purchases through online vendors or independent websites there’s additional ways to protect your financial information. One service that is particularly helpful is Bill Me Later. Not only does it allow you to only give your financial information to one company instead of many, it lets you defer payment for a short period of time. Hundreds of the top online retailers use their service.

One of the safest ways of protecting your financial information though is using one-time use credit card numbers. A few of the major banks offer this service. Basically you go to their website, they generate a one-time use only credit card number that when used will reference to your real credit card account. I found a great article discussing this very topic on AuctionBytes.com. It explains the concept much better than I could.

One of the best resources for advice on watching your finances and protecting your credit is Clark Howard. Although, I’m pretty sure everybody knows who he is by now. There’s LOTS of information on his website about protecting your identity and your financial information.

Have fun out there, and stay safe!

Craigslist Classified Ads

There's another great alternative to paying retail price - free online classifieds! The most popular online classifieds website is Craigslist. The site has classifieds for all sorts of things such as sales, advertisements for garage sales, personals, and discussion forums. For the purpose of this post I'll be discussing the "for sale" classifieds.

Craigslist is very similar to newspaper classifieds, except the website is updated constantly. Individuals post advertisements for items they would like to sell and some people even make posts requesting items they need. It is important to pay attention to certain aspects of each post. Each heading typically contains three pieces of information: a basic description of the item, an asking price, and a location. Sometimes the poster will deliberately provide false information, such as a price of only $1 for something clearly more valuable than a dollar in an effort to get a wider range of viewers. Keep this in mind when viewing search results. Users can also limit search results by these aspects. Guidelines for search keywords on Craigslist is the same as those for using eBay.

There are some social rules or etiquette that people often follow with regard to transactions through craigslist. Posters provide some sort of contact information in their ad, and when contacting a poster a "requester" should also provide contact information. Both parties should resolve all questions and concerns before either party makes the trip to pick up the item. Try to barter over the purchase price before going to pick up or deliver the item. It's rude to back out of a transaction at the last moment. Additionally, the purchaser usually makes the trip to the seller, unless the distance is great (then both parties will generally meet in the middle). Sellers usually prefer to deal in cash, because it is the safest way to make sure they get paid.

Typically Craigslist is a better option for selling or purchasing large items such as furniture or large lots of items. Sometimes it's worthwhile to find smaller items on Craigslist if you need something in a short period of time, or you happen to come across something nearby. Because of the smaller audience (local city only generally), items also typically sell for less than they would on eBay or other retail websites. Just think of Craigslist as an ever changing, updating garage sale! Really that's all it is! Except, instead of wandering neighborhood streets hoping to randomly come across the perfect item, you have the convenience and the freedom to shop around and compare from your home or office.

It is very important that you consider the context of Craigslist and keep safety in mind. If you are not comfortable visiting the seller's home, then request that they meet you in a well populated, public location. This is not an unreasonable request. Also, as a seller, if you are uncomfortable with a person based on communication, it is not unreasonable to refuse to sell your item to that person. Remember, with private transactions there's no protection against fraud, so protect yourself and your things!

I hope that's helpful for those of you wishing you could save a little money here and there without having to wait on shipping. I've found some truly great deals on Craigslist that I wouldn't have been able to afford otherwise.

Edit 11/1/07: I came across a very important article that points out the critical issue of safety in dealing with online classified ads. A young woman used Craigslist to locate a nanny position. When she went to interview with the family, she didn't return. She was later found dead in the trunk of her car. Even though online classifieds are a great way to get a great deal, please keep your safety in mind!

eBay Bidding Techniques

I've been using eBay to find good deals and nifty stuff for quite a number of years now. I've heard differing opinions on how to navigate the bidding process. Ultimately, it depends on your desire for the item, how much of a deal you want, and what time the auction ends. The basic bidding process is the easiest to use, because eBay handles a lot of the work for you. When you find an item you want, place a bid for the absolute most you're willing to pay (before shipping) and eBay will bid in increments up to your maximum bid as long as the auction is open. If you get outbid and decide you really would be willing to spend more, you can bid again. This isn't necessarily the best way to get a good deal, however. With most purchases I like to use the "bid shark" method:
1. Watch the item until it becomes near the end of the auction.
2. If the bid price is still low enough to be worth bidding, watch the item by refreshing the page every 30 seconds to a minute.
3. Place a bid for the absolute most you're willing to pay at the very end, with between 30 seconds and a minute to go before close of the auction.

This technique accomplishes a few things:

• It keeps other bidders from deciding "Oh, I guess I could spend a few more dollars, let me go back and bid again since I've been outbid."
• It keeps the purchase price lower because bidders aren't constantly going back and forth, raising the price with each bid.
• It ensures that you will only bid high enough to get a really good deal; you won't be tempted to bid again and again just to "win" the item.

When choosing to use this technique, you need to remember a few things:

• Make sure you can and will be paying very close attention to the auction when it comes to a close. I have missed quite a few deals by watching TV or surfing the net instead of entering my final bid. I've even completely forgotten about the auction many times! This also means don't try to bid this way on auctions that close at 2 in the morning; they're probably not worth the extra hassle.
• Don't use the "bid shark" method if the auction is something you simply must have and can't risk losing to an extremely high pre-placed maximum bid. You probably won't have time to re-bid if you wait until the last 30 seconds of an auction to place your bid.
• Make sure you finish your bid completely; there are at least 2 steps to completing a bid on an item. Do not forget to confirm, or you will miss out on making your bid!

I hope this helps you understand the process better. Remember, use your powers for good, not evil!