Shopping at Amazon.com Saves You Money
I love shopping at Amazon.com
Amazon.com and eBay.com.au are my two favourite places to shop online.
Despite this I don’t know very many people who shop at Amazon and I have no idea why. As it has the potential to save you hundreds, even thousands, of dollars a year.
Maybe it has something to do with it being located overseas in America and they think the shipping costs will be prohibitive. I am not sure. But I couldn’t be without it.
Not only does it save me money, it gives me access to items that I cannot get in Australia or that haven’t been released here yet.
Given my obvious love for it and seeing as how I mention Amazon.com a lot in my posts I thought I would give you a run down on why I think it is so good and what to expect.
For those of you who don’t know what Amazon.com is it is the biggest online department store in the world. It started its life way back in the 1990s as a book seller and has gone from strength to strength from there.
The real trick with Amazon (and maybe this is why a lot of Australian don’t order from them) is you need to buy a few items at a time to bring down the delivery costs per item.
There are several separate pricing structures for delivery to Australia, depending on how quickly you want your items and what the items are. The delivery times are: 18-32 business days, 8-16 business days and 3-5 business days. As you would expect, the faster you want your items the more it will cost you. You can find all the information about these rates here at Amazon’s Australian shipping cost structure page.
I always choose the 8-16 business days delivery as I have learned that most of the time you receive your items in less than a week, despite what they say. It also depends on what you are ordering. I usually only order books or DVDs, but you can find out more about the cost of shipping other items here.
The cost of shipping books or DVDs for the 8-16 business days time frame is a base rate of US$13.99, plus US$5.99 per book or US$3.99 per DVD. This may sound rather steep but with the discounts Amazon.com give you on each item and if you stick to ordering 3 or more items you will come out in front every time. A great example of this is in my post on comparison shopping.
But I would really like to illustrate this point further, so I have selected three DVDs at random to see how much they would cost us if we ordered them from Amazon and also see what they would cost us if ordered from an Australian online retailer, say EzyDVD.
NOTE: When you order DVDs from the USA they will be Region 1 formatted so you will need to have a DVD player that will play them. Most DVD players do these days, but this is something to be aware of.
To make this comparison fair I have chosen three DVDs pretty much randomly but I have chosen one older movie (Charlie’s Angels), one new release movie (Alien vs Predator 2) and one TV show (Lost, Season 3).
You can see the prices of each of the DVDs from the respective sites below and I have taken time to convert the US prices on Amazon to Australia Dollars (using an independent third site: XE’s Universal Currency Converter).
| DVD | Amazon (AU$) | EzyDVD (AU$) |
| Charlie’s Angels Movie | $15.95 | $19.83 |
| Alien vs Predator 2 | $18.07 | $29.83 |
| Lost - Season 3 | $34.55 | $89.93 |
| SUB-TOTAL | $68.57 | $139.59 |
| Shipping | $27.60 | FREE |
| GRAND TOTAL | AU$96.17 | AU$139.59 |
This table speaks volumes. Even with EzyDVD’s free shipping, Amazon beats their total price by AU$43.42. Do you really need any more proof to showcase how Amazon.com can save you money?
Sure you may have to wait a couple of extra days for the items to arrive but isn’t that worth an extra $43 to you? I know it is to me.
The trick to shopping at Amazon is to be patient, and create a wish list of items you want to buy. Then, when you are ready to purchase some items then you can choose a handful of the ones in your wish list and save yourself some money!
Have you ever shopped at Amazon.com
Image credit: Command-Tab
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