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Archive for September, 2007

Home cooking savings, Woot sells out, etc

Published September 18th, 2007 in Interesting / Other. 4 Comments

Does cooking home really cost less than what fast food chains charge?

I have asked myself this kind of question many times. Is it worth cooking your lunch at home and if you do so, will you be able to beat Quiznos and Subway’s rock bottom prices?

For me this question is out of table since lunch out is not just a meal but also an opportunity to meet friends (which is priceless) and therefore I personally vote for the “not so cheap” food at a restaurant.

Where do you eat your lunch?

Source: Does Cooking At Home Really Beat The McDonalds $1 Double Cheeseburger? at SimpleDollar

Woot partners with Yahoo! Shopping

The most popular of one day a deal sites strengthens its position by partnering with Yahoo! Shopping, a price comparison and shopping portal. If you head to Yahoo! Shopping front page, it is very easy to spot the new “Deal of the Day” section in the middle. Powered by Woot it will however serve different deals than those on Woot.com (no bag of crap for you, Yahoo? :-)).

According to the blog post at Woot.com, there is no money involved as part of this agreement. What is in it for Woot then? “access to their gigunda audience of shoppers who’ve never met Woot”. Plus they probably get to keep all the proceeds from the suddenly increasing sales.

What is in it for Yahoo!? “Yahoo! gets to lure you all (old Woot users) through their front door”. I really doubt devoted Wooters is who Yahoo! really after. What Yahoo! gets is an experienced team and a smoothly running “deal a day” machine which is a great addition to their portal. Cnet has one and it is very popular.

Source: Woot Sells Out! at Woot.com

Farecast flexes muscles with hotel prices

Farecast, the startup known for their air fare prediction service is testing waters in new area, hotel pricing. Just as airline tickets, hotels prices have seasonal changes and are affected by local events (conventions, fairs, etc). Farecast helps you decide if a specific hotel offering is a good deal or not by comparing historical hotel prices to the price on the day of your stay. There is not cross hotel comparison. Why?

We believe that supply and demand within a market is a fantastic indicator of the quality of a hotel. If Hotel B is inferior to Hotel C, Hotel B is not going to be able to charge a premium rate in the market and fill their rooms. Therefore, the prices other hotels have available is not relevant to whether the given hotel is a deal.

Makes sense to me. At least this is how it should work in an ideal market with abundance of information about the quality of services offered by all competitors.

Source: Finding Bargain Rooms at a Glance at New York Times

Brand name premium, should you pay one?

Published September 17th, 2007 in Money Saving Tips. 7 Comments

I recently bought a new set of tires for my car and the list of cheap tire resellers I compiled some time ago came out very handy. However I ended up buying neither one of the popular brands mentioned in the list. Why? It is actually a billion dollar question. Billions is how much US businesses are estimated to be spending annually on brand name recognition.

I fully understand how valuable brand name can be for the business in convincing customers in their decision making. I am trying however to look at this subject from online bargain hunting perspective. By buying a branded product you in most cases pay a hefty “brand name recognition” premium. Do you want to? Do you have to?

Keeping up with the Joneses

I don’t consider myself an average American however I understand the meaning of “keeping up with the Joneses” concept very well. If you are the kind, you can stop reading right here. By throwing your hard earned cash into a popular brand you have “your money well spent”. If you are the “don’t care about Joneses” kind like myself then keep on reading.

Joneses aside, a quality product at the lowest possible price is what any consumer ultimately wants. I personally think Internet has placed in our hands very powerful tools to achieve this ultimate goal. The trick is just to know when and what tool to use.

Brand name is about confidence

Take a look at eBay. Part of their tremendous success is due to the seller/buyer feedback system which lowered the entry level barrier for “new and unknown little guys” to join ranks of successful online resellers. Seeing positive feedback adds buyer the confidence needed to follow through with the sale transaction.

ResellerRating is another popular place to solicit information about a questionable reseller. If manufacturer brand is what you have question about, many popular online reseller maintain customer feedback/reviews which in many cases give you plenty of information about how good the brand/product is. The “popular” is the key word here. Smaller shops simply don’t have enough customers to build the knowledge base. Amazon, TireRack, NewEgg are a few good examples of stores with scores of information on the products and brands.

Are there any exceptions?

The only example that I can think of when you might really want to pay for the brand is personal care and pharmaceutical products. These are too complex to be easily reproduced by smaller unknown firms and while you in some cases may be safe using generic substitutes (think Tylenol), in many other cases to ensure the expected results you are better off sticking to the brand.

Besides drugs, another good example is cosmetics. According to my wife, she will only go with an established brand as far as facial creams are concerned. On the other hand she will readily substitute an expensive branded mascara with a cheaper lesser known alternative.

What is your take on brands? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

DealDotCom and their minions

Published September 16th, 2007 in Business Marketing. 2 Comments

What do you get when you mix the “deal a day” concept with a lucrative affiliate marketing program? You will get a website with a somewhat confusing name, DealDotCom. Not that it is impossibly confusing however if anyone were to tell me the name on the phone, I would no doubt head to a different destination.

I have followed today’s buzz and flocked to take a look at this new wonder. From the first sight the site didn’t look like anything special however as I was going through the pages I was slowly getting it.

What is DealDotCom?
DealDotCom.com is the place on the web to find all the Internet Marketing products you really want for rock bottom prices. We sell products and services that help save you time and money when it comes to running your online business.

It appears the deals the startup intends to sell are for people with online presence, blog owners and webmasters. I expect some SEO related stuff as well since SEO is closely related to internet marketing. I even secretly hope they have a promotion for that highly praised SEO book Mike mentioned in his guest post. Maybe I will finally buy to read it. My frugal self can’t justify spending $79 for something I am having hard time giving practical value to. SEO is such an obscure thing.

Who runs DealDotCom?
DealDotCom is run by a handful of code monkeys and assorted minions. The guys in charge are just a couple of lovable Internet Marketers who think that fun and excitement should be injected into the otherwise predicable, dry, and boring world of Internet Marketing.

The website is not yet operational. The official launch date is Tuesday, September 18. And while the “dealdotcom.com” page still shows the countdown timer, you can access the content via this invitation link or by typing “dealdotcom.com/home” in the browser.

The guys surely have a sense of humor. I had my best chuckle in months. Where else can you find something like this on the FAQ page?

I want to talk to a live person there, can I call you?
You may want to talk to a live person, but we really don’t want to talk to you. People who call tend to keep our minions on the phone for hours at a time, discussing minutiae. If you’re famous, eminently important, or want to give us millions of dollars, include your phone number in your email, and we’ll call you.

Humor is exactly what made Woot so popular and these “lovable Internet Marketers” certainly did their homework. I predict DealDotCom a noisy launch. What happens next mostly depends on the kind of deals they serve. Affiliate program by itself is not going to make DealDotCom successful. I like their attitude though. Here is an excerpt from the “sell your product” page:

Also, note the name of this website - DealDotCom… the operative word here being DEAL. Whatever you’re selling through us must be an actual DEAL. Offering $10 off a $500 product is definitely not a deal. Likewise, allowing us to sell your $47 product for $97, and letting us keep the extra fifty bucks is most certainly not a deal.

An interesting business idea and very promising start. I will add this site to my watch list for now.

Magazine-Agent, the website review

Published September 13th, 2007 in Money Saving Tools. 3 Comments

Christina Aguilera at Maxim I am not a big magazine lover. In fact I only subscribe to a couple of magazines and hardly have time to read any that I receive. For quite some time I totally switched to online sources for my news. Nevertheless I will get on a good deal once in a while each time hoping I will free up my schedule a little bit to allow for some pleasure reading.

I personally believe printed media, just like music on CD’s, is living out its last years and it will be hard to find any magazines 50 years from now… and this is exactly why right now is a very good time to be in the market of discounted magazines. The publishers keep slashing prices and you offer better and better deals each year, until nothing will be left to offer.

Magazine-Agent is one of such discounted magazine resellers who make their living by direct magazine sales and through an in-house affiliate program. I am not their affiliate and hence I will not review that part of the business, however judging by the left-side bar ad promising “up to 60%” pay out rates to Magazine-Agent partners, it probably is not too bad.

Here are some things I like

Convenient website navigation - Magazine-Agent has the best user interface I have seen in a magazine website. You can select magazines by price, popularity, or category. I also appreciate the ability to see all magazines offered by same publisher. I really have just one complain: “Computer & Internet” category shows 26 magazines however half of these are not available. I wouldn’t include unavailable magazines in the total count since it looks very deceiving.
Nice magazine previews - The cover page preview is just terrific. Sometimes you can see magazine cover pages several years in the past. This somewhat compensates for the lack of magazine reviews in Magazine-Agent database
100% refund if not satisfied within 90 days - This could be convenient for some. The terms say:

If you find that within the first three months of placing your order that you are not 100% satisfied - for any reason - let us know and we will gladly give you a full, prompt refund.
Online subscription management - I have no idea what magazines my family is reading, how much they are costing us, and when the subscriptions expire because they all come from different sources. In addition, unsubscribing from some can be quite a pain. Magazine-Agent is a publisher authorized reseller of all the titles they offer. Managing subscriptions from one place is certainly a convenience.

Things I don’t like

Prices are not the lowest out there - I have compared a few magazine subscription services and Magazine-Agent is certainly not the cheapest. You usually will be able to find much lower prices especially if you are willing to buy magazines in packages (several subscriptions at a time).
Free gift card - Huh? Shouldn’t the gift card be in the list of things I like? Well, it would be if I was able to find at least some details on what kind of gift card it is. Instead the promotion looks more like a teaser offering very little information on what exactly I sign up to. The image below is all I see when I click on it. Am I too picky?

What websites do you use when shopping for a magazine? Please share your recommendations in the comments.

This is post is sponsored by Magazine-Agent via ReviewMe

Magazine-Agent Free Gift

Popular coupon sites - August 2007

Published September 12th, 2007 in Popular Sites Series. 2 Comments

This is August 2007 revision of the Popular Coupon sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.

The change in rating shows the difference compared to July results. The list has a total of 24 web sites. I have added wow-coupons.com and couponseven.com this month and deleted couponalbum.com for spamming on my blog. Just kidding. I moved them to my deal sites list since they seem to post not only coupons but also individual products.

The winner this month is again eversave.com (7.37%). The worst result comes from shopping-bargains.com who’s Alexa rank drops by 28.08%. This is the second month in the row as they drop by over 20%. In fact they never had a positive month since I started to track them in February of this year.

There are 13 more coupon sites in my database that didn’t meet the Alexa Rank < 250,000 requirement. If you know a popular coupon site and it is missing from this list, please leave a comment or send me a note and I will add it with the next release.

#	Web Site	Alexa Rank		Page Rank		Online Since
1	coolsavings.com	4967	(-7.37%)	6		03-Jun-1996
2	coupons.com	7814	(0.89%)	6		07-Sep-1994
3	eversave.com	9593	(7.37%)	5		08-Apr-1999
4	retailmenot.com (info)	12611	(1.08%)	6		27-Oct-2006
5 (1)	couponmountain.com	20699	(5.53%)	6		05-May-2001
6 (1)	couponcabin.com	22116	(-5.91%)	6		27-Feb-2003
7	mycoupons.com	40719	(-13.07%)	0		16-Feb-1999
8	couponchief.com	48896	(2.65%)	6		15-Jan-2005
9	valpak.com	70249	(-14.15%)	6		22-Jun-1994
10	wow-coupons.com	90429	(n/a)	5	(n/a)	26-Nov-2003
11 (1)	currentcodes.com	100809	(-4.91%)	5		27-Dec-2000
12 (1)	ultimatecoupons.com	118353	(4.6%)	4		02-Jul-2001
13 (1)	gogoshopper.com	126050	(-9.76%)	5		16-Dec-1999
14 (3)	shopping-bargains.com	135709	(-28.08%)	4		20-Feb-1999
15	couponseven.com	136975	(n/a)	3	(n/a)	23-May-2006
16	couponmom.com	157121	(-1.76%)	6		25-Jun-2002
17	couponpages.com	159539	(-2.47%)	4		25-Jun-1997
18	thegrocerygame.com	159773	(6.28%)	5		28-Aug-2001
19 (4)	savings.com	172736	(-12.01%)	4		20-Apr-1995
20 (6)	couponwinner.com	172912	(-17.42%)	4		30-Jan-2006
21 (2)	couponsurfer.com	186309	(4.89%)	4		11-Feb-1998
22 (2)	couponbug.com	210668	(-3.3%)	6		24-Apr-2002
23 (1)	hotcoupons.com	238849	(-5.18%)	6		15-Dec-1995
24 (2)	naughtycodes.com	246978	(-12.88%)	4		26-Nov-2001

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