Saturday, December 10, 2011

Modern Shopping - Easier, Faster and You Save Money

Hi All,

I was just reading an article from the New York Times titled, 'A New Secret Weapon For Electronics Shoppers'.

It was an interesting and timely article - especially since we are in the middle of the holiday shopping season.

Essentially the article discusses the fact that when purchasing various items (think cars, camera's smartphones and other electronic equipment) shoppers are at a disadvantage when shopping. Retailers and manufacturers know about you and the potential purchases you might make...so they can send out advertisements for sales and for coupons.

The playing field has been leveled the article goes on to say with websites like Pricegrabber.com and Bizrate.com and NexTag.com (historical price information). Finally a site like FreePriceAlerts.com has been very helpful in that it notifies customers via email when the price of a particular item drops. Cool stuff, eh?

Now a new site by the name of Decide.com has gone live. Decide.com collects and mines billions of transactions to determine what the best price is and whether there will be an even better price in the near future. Wow! Think of the computing power necessary to generate this data!
The unique aspect of the site is the predictive power of it...now we have a website that essentially suggests whether or not buyers should hold off making a purchase (because the price of the item might drop in the future) or whether they should make the purchase now (because the price of the item might increase in the future). Cool stuff!

Enjoy your purchases!
Stu

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