Bob Caswell

While this holiday season has been met with record online shopping, remember that many retailers (even the online ones) don’t necessarily offer their best prices leading up to Christmas. I personally did much of my Christmas shopping via Amazon. And today being the day after Christmas, I thought I’d check the current prices on all those presents I bought and shipped. Here’s what I found:

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The Economist, via numbers from Comscore, tells us that since the beginning of November online spending is up by 18% compared with 2006. And Thursday December 6th was the “biggest online spending day yet” with sales of $803m, which made for a weekly online sales record of $4.6 billion (see chart below). Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal today explains that traditional retailers are making a final big push before Christmas (why would they ever not make a big push at this time?).

The articles cites a study/survey, which shows that approximately 71% of shoppers were done shopping as of December 23rd while past holiday seasons have had more like 85% of shoppers done by the 23rd. Part of the article reminded me of my own situation:

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(*Update* The deal mentioned in the title is over, but Amazon has an even better deal: HD DVD player & 7 Movies for $132.)

Today I came across this article by Joel Hruska at Ars Technica in which he links to this Blu-ray deal on Amazon and says the following:

“Samsung is hoping to tilt the scales in favor of Blu-ray; as of right now, Samsung’s BD-P1400 Blu-ray player is selling for $279 on Amazon, down from a $499 MSRP. That’s not so much a discount as it is a steal, and it drops the BD-P1400 squarely within the price range for an HD DVD box.”

I couldn’t help but respond with all of Amazon’s concurrent HD DVD deals, which happen to be much better than the above mentioned “steal.”

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Toward the end of last week, I pointed out a deal on Amazon for an HD-DVD player with 10 movies for $174. Interestingly enough, I purchased the player online during Black Friday. That is, the day where all the good deals are supposed to be in stores at early morning hours.

Since I had a few other gadgets in mind (not to be named, as they might be for some who may be reading this!) which weren’t offered at any discount during Black Friday, I thought I’d wait until the infamous “Cyber Monday.” For the uninitiated, Cyber Monday is the Monday after Thanksgiving that is supposed to be the online equivalent of the day-after-Thanksgiving sales. Here is a good article on CNN Money.

But to my surprise and frustration, I have found less interesting online deals today versus Black Friday. In fact, Amazon actually raised the prices on a few of the items I had my eye on. And that HD-DVD player deal? Here it is again for those who missed it the first time, but this time it’s priced at $179 and only comes with 7 movies (update: now two months later it’s only $132). Still a pretty good deal even if I’m glad I didn’t wait till today for mine.

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So this week I’m on vacation in Orlando (never been to Disney World until now). The hotel is called the Buena Vista Palace and is located right outside the theme parks. I found the hotel via Priceline.com and thought it was a good deal until I got nickel and dimed to death upon arrival. I’m not sure who to be annoyed at more: Priceline for not including specific, applicable information that any visitor would want to know beforehand, or the hotel, which has a backwards approach to the term “convenience.”

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CompUSA recently announced that it will be closing more than half of its 225 stores (see the list of closings here). The computer store chain is giving the following reason, “Based on changing conditions in the consumer retail electronics markets, the company identified the need to close and sell stores with low performance or nonstrategic, old store layouts and locations faced with market saturation.”

Translation: CompUSA hasn’t been competitive for some time, and the problem has caught up with the retailer. There are only so many computer beginners willing to pay $20 for a printer cable available for less than half that price at many locations both on and offline.

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Looks like your friend and mine, the amazing Costco return policy, is on its way out. Apparently, it did enough damage to the already razor thin profit margins of the company for management to take action. For those unfamiliar, it used to be that you could return anything whenever you wanted for a full refund (with the exception of desktop computers, which had a limit of six months). The policy was one of the reasons why I was an avid Costco electronics shopper (if the wanted gizmo was carried there).

But I always knew it would only be a matter of time before the too-good-to-be-true shopping scenario changed. Though even with the change, Costco likely still has the best return policy out there. Here’s what to expect:

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A new study out this week claims that users that browse newspaper websites are more likely to be online shoppers. Newspaper website browsers apparently spend quite a bit more online than your average online shopper. Readers are more likely than other Internet users to spend “upwards of $1,000 online annually.”

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