Laze's Online Shopping Essentials

Coupons/Rebates

ebates
If you use ebates to get your online purchases, you get up to 25% (but usually more like 5-10%) back! Simply sign up for an ebates address and use that as your e-mail address for online shopping. You must go through their site to get the rebates, though. The rebates come in the form of a check a couple of times a year. You can make a small percentage on purchases made by people you refer, as well. It's a great way to save some money -- I saved $25 in my first few months of normal use. The link above will mark me as your referrer; feel free to remove the "referrer=laze" part of the URL, but I certainly appreciate you keeping it in as a thank-you for the "Essentials" pages. :) You can usually use ebates as well as any coupons you find at sites mentioned below.

Amazing Bargains
A new heavy-hitter in online coupon reporting. Daily updates and recently reorganized. This is a labor of love that benefits everybody.

DVD Coupon Forum
A great place to keep your eye out for late-breaking DVD coupons and deals.

Price Comparisons

Mysimon
Mysimon is a great shopping "bot" that will automatically search stores for the best price for almost anything you can buy online. It currently keeps an eye on over 1600 stores. A nice new feature is being able to track an item's price at a given store over a period of time. Helpful to watch trends on particular items.

DVD Price Search
Similar to Mysimon, except focused strictly on DVDs. This is a better choice than Mysimon for DVDs since it allows you to build a shopping basket and then compare the cost of all items plus shipping across a variety of stores.

DealTime
acses.com/dealpilot.com/evenbetter.com merged with dealtime.com. Not really for the better, either. But, the book comparison section is still a better bet than Mysimon for pricing multiple books or foreign titles.

Online Music Stores

Half.Com
Take the variety of ebay and combine it with the navigability and informative nature of Amazon, and you have Half.com. Essentially, this is a bunch of individuals and small shops selling music, movies, and books for at least 50% off of retail (meaning they are either used or promotional items). The nice thing is that, unlike ebay, the descriptions are actually useful (have you ever actually read through item descriptions on ebay? The sellers have no command of the language and seem to have a burning desire to use goofy ways to get attention, like urging you to "L@@K" at an item). The seller just has to enter an ISBN (for books) or the UPC code (for movies and music) and the information is grabbed from a central database. The individual sellers actually take care of shipping you the merchandise, so there is a level of risk involved, but sellers are given ratings, just like on ebay. I currently buy 90% of my CDs online through half.com.

Second Spin
Used CDs on the Web from an award-winning dealer. Can't go wrong here. You can even track your favorite artists to see if any new used CDs come in.

Other Online Storefronts

The Book Cart
It will be interesting to see how this concept and business model works out in the long run. The idea here is that a community of users get rid of their books on this site, but don't actually charge anything for them. This allows interested people to get, essentially, free books. A buyer pays only a dollar and change for shipping, and the seller sends it to them and is reimbursed by The Book Cart. Users are encouraged to put their books in the pool, in the spirit of the site, though it's not a requirement, as you might guess from the name, "The Friendly Internet Paperback Exchange." The two questions I have: 1 -- can a company really sustain themselves strictly through advertising (especially when it does cost them every time someone takes advantage of a free book), and 2 -- will there be enough people interested in trading their books online rather than selling them to a used bookstore? Number 1 I'm not sure about, but for number 2, I think that the answer is yes, especially in the case of readers of romance novels. The few people I know that do read romance tear through their books like there was no tomorrow and are likely to trade them in for more books. Beyond them, I'm not sure how active the site will be, but it should be a fun trip along the way.