Comparison Shopping: It Will Save You Money
Too many times in the past have I gone into a store looking for an item I wanted and, after finding it, buying it right there and then.
This is the worst way to shop and the worst way to save money.
If you really want to save money you need to comparison shop. To put it simply: shop around.
I want to illustrate this using a recent purchase I made of the book The Millionaire Next Door
I have been reading a lot of websites on personal finance lately (surprise surprise!) and a lot of them have recommended this book. I went into my local Borders store and had a quick skim through its pages and decided that it was good enough for me to want to to read the whole thing. But Borders was charging $34.95 for it brand new. I was pretty keen to get it at this point but I thought $34.95 was a tad over-priced, especially for a book that was originally published in 1996.
I put it back on the shelf, left the store (with my $35) and decided to have a look elsewhere. I knew that most of the other book stores in the city would all be selling it for the same price so I decided to head home and jump online.
I have two main places I go shopping online: eBay and Amazon.com
My first stop was Amazon. Even though they are American-based and delivery costs can be quite steep for a one-off purchase to Australia I usually have a list of about 20 things that I want to buy from them at any one time, so delivery becomes less important as I buy several items at once (although I still factor this into the final price I pay for anything).
The main reason I headed to Amazon first was to get an idea of the price as well. Amazon had it’s RRP for US$15.00, but were selling it with a 32% discount for US$10.20. Already way cheaper than Borders.
This is where Amazon really shines. It offers great discounts on many items and books are usually heavily discounted. I want to do a little calculation at this point to illustrate how Australians get ripped off regularly from brick-and-mortar stores (especially “big-box” retailers like Borders).
The conversion from US-Dollars to Australian Dollars is (at time of writing): US$1 = AUS$0.93. So our US$10.20 book works out to be only $10.90 in Australian Dollars.
Not that I would do this, but lets assume that I ordered just this book from Amazon and had it delivered on its own. The delivery costs would be US$19.98, which works out to be $21.34 in Australian Dollars (you can see now why I combine items). Add this to the price of the book and you get a total of AUS$32.24 - still cheaper than what I would of paid at Borders!
Now imagine how much less it would cost you if you ordered 3 or 4 more items at the same time.
But I didn’t stop there. I then head over to eBay.com.au and see what other people are selling the book for. Typing in the name of the book and hitting search I came across a few copies for sale. To cut a long story short, I ended up getting the book for $11.71 plus delivery of $6.30 for a total of $18.01. That’s a $16.94 saving than if I bought it that day at Borders. And I had it in about 5 days from first finding in on eBay.
I could of gotten it new from Amazon.com but I didn’t want to buy any other items at that point to save on delivery costs and it would of worked out about the same any way (depending on how many items I had ordered).
That’s just one example of how comparison shopping saved me money. And it can save you money too. Imagine if you comparison shopped every time you wanted to buy something? You would be saving quite a considerable amount of money! Money that could be working for you in your high-interest earning savings account or paying off your credit card debt.
Do you comparison shop? If so what’s the most you have ever saved?
Image credit: Elsie
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[...] week I wrote a post upon the importance of comparison shopping and how it can save you a lot of money. Well, today I just wanted to quickly give you another [...]