School is in session. Please pay attention; there will be a pop quiz! Does buying online scare you? It shouldn’t. There are few keys to making the experience simple, painless and cost effective.

Quick Shopping Tips from Shopping dot 101

• Use Amazon.com Customer Reviews
• Pay attention to shipping prices
• Froogle’s learning curve is worth it
• Look carefully at smaller vendors
• Email vendors before and after the sale

Search and re-Search
I was recently buying some gifts. A friend of mine had told me about the “space pen”, with gas-pressurized ink allowing writing upside down. It takes its name from the fact that all NASA and Russian space missions have taken the pen with them to outer space. Clever aren’t they?

Visiting Amazon.com, I typed in “space pen”. I got back a cool looking bullet pen, by Fisher Space Pens for $19.00. The reviews all gave the pen 5 stars. Great! I clicked to add it to my shopping cart. Amazon often offers free shipping, but this product did not meet the requirements.

Looking closer I saw, the actual vendor was not Amazon but The Writer’s Edge, hence no offer for free shipping. Not to worry, I trust Amazon to vet their vendors for excellent customer service and quality. Simple, right? Maybe…
Click here for more.

Shopping Power
Whenever shopping in the world’s marketplace I like to request lower prices. In a market in Morocco it is known as haggling. In the online market, we can’t negotiate the price with Amazon, so we must look elsewhere.

I like to look at Froogle. As the play on words implies it is for finding prices on goods by using the master of search, Google. I had learned the manufacturer of the space pen, so I chose, “fisher space pens” as my search term. As if Froogle wanted to mock Amazon, it told me it had 191 references to this pen. Great, where do I begin?

Sifting the Fine Print
Froogle’s results page has a nice thumbnail image of each product it found in the middle of the page. The first one listed that matched our image from Amazon was from a site called: DefenseDevices.com and only $16.95. Not bad. But the site was a little “different looking” with StunGuns StunBatons as a major menu item. The most disturbing thing was the copyright date was from 2004. An out of date site is a warning sign that shopping could be filled with pitfalls. Back to Froogle.

On the right side of Froogle is what pays the bills. Google’s Ads are often useful search tools as the advertiser paid money to get themselves in front of you, and hopefully their ad matches your query. (Disclaimer: I use these ads for clients of mine with great success, thus I like them.) The first ad is for our Amazon vendor, but the second ad that day was intriguing, for GoldSpot.com advertising 30% off, the pen was $18.70. Finally a few more ads down was Daly’s Pen Shop of Milwaukee, with an ad for 25% off, and a price of $16.99! Bingo!

Final Pop Quiz
Whew! Now that’s some shopping. But there is still one step left quizzing the vendor. I like to write a quick email to the order confirmation I get from smaller vendors. I use it as a benchmark to see their responsiveness, and in this case, Brad from the store wrote right back and was very pleasant. His quick email gave me a final feeling of satisfaction. A few days later I was gifting the pen. The Grade: “A ” for service, selection, and satisfaction.

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