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Last-minute eBay auctions

Published August 4th, 2008 in Money Saving Tools. 0 Comments

lastminute auctions screenshot

Lastminute-Auctions.com is a tool for eBay bargain hunting that I somehow managed to miss. The website is not new (I found the first reference dated back to 2005) and the user interface is a bit awkward, but it does the job fine if you are OK with some rough edges (I know, I am a perfectionist)

lastminute-auction.com provides a new way to hunt for great bargains on eBay.com. We search current offers on ebay.com for auctions which meet our strict simple criteria:
1. The auction ends in 1 hour.
2. The price is currently 1 dollar or less.

Auction title, current price, expiration, number of bids, and shipping charges are crammed in a very compact list for the auctions that satisfy the criteria above. You can also narrow your selection by category or search stuff by title.

I gave it a try today and already found some “cool” stuff like this Atari monitor for $0.50 - pack 3 in a stack and you could use them as an artsy bar-stool. Seriously though, for the most part the auction details are accurate when clicking through to eBay and the only problem I potentially see with the site is that a reserve price if set can throw a monkey wrench into your bargain hunting efforts.

Are you an eBay junkie? What tools do you use to find your treasures?

Related reading:

What is hot on eBay? Here Pops the answer!

Browse popular eBay auctions with bidThumbs

Opportunistic bargain hunting with TypoTrawler

Chase Freedom Plus - received third statement

Published May 8th, 2008 in Money Saving Tools. 17 Comments

Ever since I switch to Chase Freedom Plus as my primary credit card, I have been trying to keep an eye on my spending and accumulated rewards. Last week I received my third statement and can share some more details on the benefits the Plus upgrade offers compared to the regular Chase Freedom card.

First of all, when I signed up, the card came with miles rewards and I have still not been able to switch to the cash rewards mode. I called the customer service a couple times but several weeks later I still see miles in my account rewards page. The whole procedure also resulted into some mess in the rewards reported online. Last month reporting was partially frozen and I now see those rewards credited back to me as an adjustment.

Difference between miles and points

The main difference is in the options available for redeeming rewards. In the miles mode, a $50 Shell Gift Card in exchange for 5,000 reward miles is probably closest you can get to cash. There are more options if you are willing to travel, for example an unrestricted round trip ticket to any destination (max value $350) for 25,000 rewards miles looks very interesting. In the cash mode your best option is to wait till you collect 20,000 points and exchange them to a $250 check. This is what I have always done with the old card.

Charging travel on Chase Freedom is not a good idea

My total bill this month came to $3719. We are planning a trip to my friends’ wedding for June, hence more expenses than usual. A big chunk of it is the tickets from United Airlines. They were correctly categorized as “Travel” on the account activity page but are missing from the Top Purchase categories on my bill due to the fact that “Travel” is not one of 15 categories currently covered by Chase (scroll down for the complete list of covered categories). I would have gotten a better deal if I used my Costco American Express for this purchase since it offers straight 2% on travel related expenses.

On average this card pays 3.75% straight cash rewards

My overall bonus earnings this month came to 2,222 miles (or points) which means 30% of my spendings qualified for bonus rewards. This is much less than I had during the first month (48%). If I exclude travel (tickets and car rental) then the percentage goes up to 52%. Looking back at the last 3 months, 42% of my spendings qualified for bonus rewards, 55% if I exclude this month’s travel. This overall means that the card pays back approximately 3% straight rewards, or slightly more (3.75%) if you wait to convert 20,000 points into $250 check.

Spending categories eligible for bonus rewards

Here is the complete list of 15 categories that qualify for Chase Freedom bonus rewards. Out of these, the top 6 categories by spending will be used to calculate your rewards.

Department stores
Utilities
Fast food & quick service restaurants
Gas & convenience stores
Drugstores
Cable/Satellite TV, internet providers
Pet supply stores/veterinarian
Phone/cell phone bills
Movie theaters
Grocery stores
Gym memberships
Beauty salons/SPAs
Movie rentals
Dry cleaners
Local commuting

Please share your own experience in the comments. Have you had problem switching from miles to cash like I did? What is your average cash back rewards rate on this card?

Life without eBay. The survival kit

Published February 9th, 2008 in Money Saving Tools. 3 Comments

If you go to the Seller Central at eBay forums, it is hard not to notice the very long and active discussion titled “SIGN THE PLEDGE - NO SALES FEB 18-25!”. After all it gathered over 5000 replies! The sellers are threatening to boycott the auction site in response to the higher fees and other changes that the company announced earlier this month. One of the things the sellers are particularly vocal about is that eBay will make it impossible for them to leave feedback about buyers.

I am not a regular seller on eBay but once in a while I will go there to get rid of the old stuff I don’t need any longer. eBay is great because of its popularity. eBay’s user base is so huge and diverse that oftentimes there is simply no other place where you can find people interested to buy your stuff, especially if this is something unordinary. There is not question that eBay administration is well aware of this. Ever since the site became popular the seller fees kept going up and the latest change is just another iteration.

Will the sellers boycott cause eBay any considerable damage? I doubt so. Will eBay prosper if they keep the policy of hiking fees? Randy Smythe at SickingAlpha wrote an excellent overview called eBay’s Death by a Thousand Cuts where he claims that August of 2006, when eBay had the last fee hike, is much different than today. Sellers have many more options now than back then, so do the buyers.

eBay alternatives

Whether you sell or buy, support the boycott or not, here are a few alternative venues to consider. Each of these websites below is good in their own way, many are cheaper for sellers, some are free. I will go through each and will sum up what I know about them from my own experience (as a seller and a buyer) and you are welcome to add your own story in the comments.

Craigslist

Craigslist is a great place for free local classified ads. Consider it a huge internet newspaper. You place an ad and people start emailing you. The bad part is that the ads are mostly in free format and it is pretty hard to find anything. Also, there is no buyer/seller protection or feedback system of any kind. It is up to the participants to settle the deal. Not surprisingly the place is notorious for being full of scam.

Amazon Marketplace

Amazon sells many items alongside it’s own merchandise. These are third party sellers, other companies or individuals. The information on the item for sale is limited, so buying used is a problem. Amazon seller fees vary depending on merchandise and are about the same or higher than on eBay. The good thing for buyers is protection. The deal is settled with Amazon acting as a proxy and the money exchange hands only upon a successful completion of the transaction.

Overstock

Overstock started out in 1997 by selling surplus and returned merchandise. These days the company sells new as well as surplus items and has pretty active online auctions section structured similarly to eBay auctions. Their fees seems to be much lower though and I am seriously thinking to give them a try next time I have something to sell.

Half.com (an eBay company)

Half.com is not technically an eBay alternative since eBay owns the website but still it is a very popular marketplace for used books and videos. The prices even on brand new items are VERY low and I urge you to check them out before buying retail. As far as selling stuff goes, Half.com seller fees are generally lower than those of eBay and transactions are done though Half.com directly.

uBid.com

uBid.com specializes in liquidating excess inventory and has very specific variety, mostly the stuff a corporation would sell. Have to see it to understand what I mean. The sellers are big companies like Sony, Motorola, and Dell. All auctions start at $1 and go without reserve. I have attempted to buy from uBid on several occasions but hasn’t been successful to get a fair price. I do know however people how got very good deals at uBid.

LiveDeal

LiveDeal is a local classifieds site, similar to Craigslist but with some of eBay features. I previously compared them to eBay and CraigsList. They have focused more on local listings ever since they got acquired by YellowPages. I have never used them though and cannot comment on the quality of the content. One thing that throws me off is the banner ads plastering all the pages. Yak!

SitePoint Marketplace

SitePoint MarketPlace is arguably the most popular place to sell online property, websites and such. I never sold or bought anything there but I do come to the place once in a while to pick up ideas. I believe they charge $20 per listing. Another option to consider is Digital Point Marketplace, but the place is somewhat messier in my opinion.

Less popular websites

Many of these sites are small startups that don’t offer a great variety of items for sale or have limited functionality compared to eBay. Besides small inventory, another problem I have with them is that each website looks different and it takes a while to figure out where things are. Here they are with some stats (taken from this CNN Money article). eBay numbers are also listed for comparison.

iOffer: 75,000 sellers (~1 million users), 16 million items
OnlineAuction: 50,000 sellers, 11 million items
eCrater: 33,000 active sellers, ~1 million items
BidVille: 25,000 active sellers, ~1 million items
(eBay: 250 million users, 113 million listed items)

A steal deal: PropertyRoom police auctions

Published January 5th, 2008 in Money Saving Tools. 0 Comments

Apparently unclaimed baggage is not the only weird stuff you can buy online. Check out PropertyRoom, a company founded by former police officers in 1999 to sell lost, stolen or forfeited goods from police departments.

Police has ran local auctions for ages where they sold the items that didn’t find their original owners. The idea behind PropertyRoom is to relieve the Police departments from the hassle and instead use internet to run these auctions online, similar to how eBay does it.

One auction to rule them all

The idea to combine police inventory and auction it online from a single place certainly took off. Before the company became ProperyRoom.com they used PropertyBureau.com and StealItBack.com domains which were later aggregated under one roof and by the end of 2007 became the biggest police auction website with hundreds of participating law enforcement agencies. From a February 2007 press release:

The company works with more than 850 law enforcement agencies nationwide to collect, package and sell unreturned, found and seized goods in practically every category, from consumer goods to real estate, cars and boats.

The website interface is kind of slow and smells 90’s but the company is for real and has been mentioned numerous times in press and on various Police websites including these LAPD and NYPD pages.

Not just police auctions

Property Room Police Badge Do not let the police badge in the website logo fool you. While auctioning off property from law enforcement departments may stay the core PropertyRoom business for a while, the management is vigorously looking for ways to expand the business.

All that media coverage has been bringing millions of monthly visitors to PropertyRoom and to capitalize on the web traffic the company recently started to offer surplus equipment from police departments and municipalities. For example if you go to Automotive section you can find those Crown Victoria Police Interceptors starting at $700 a piece.

The management didn’t stop there and to fill in high demand product categories such as Portable Electronics and Personal Accessories, PropertyRoom has signed contracts with many third party vendors which are now authorized to sell via the company auctions. In 2006 one half of the site’s gross sales came from these. A tip: use “Show only PropertyRoom Items” check box when you browse the auctions to filter out third party listings.

Steal your property back

One of the cool things that PropertyRoom offers is the way for stolen property owners to reclaim their goods. They call it StrealItBack. Here is how it works:

StealItBack.com, a feature of PropertyRoom.com, gives anyone the ability to search for their stolen property online, free of charge. People can recover their goods by identifying a distinguishing mark, photograph, bill of sale or the item’s serial number.

It is a very noble intent but unless you have the item serial number I seriously doubt you have a chance to recover anything. Manually running each item against a database of photographs and distinguished marks seems like extremely labor intensive procedure to me. Read more about StealItBack here.

Conclusion

444 used bikes for sale The variety of items featured on PropertyRoom is not typical for a regular online auction. Just check out this bid of 444 used bikes. I would even say the site probably works best for the entrepreneurial kind of shoppers who intend to make money reselling stuff.

If you exactly know what you want and you came to PropertyRoom with an intent to buy the thing right away - you are in the wrong place. The volume is not nearly there. That said, the fact that the auctions are not very popular works great for opportunistic bargain hunters and if you are looking in the right categories then you probably have a better chance to score a hot bargain than you do with eBay.

Also note, there is a big difference between bidding on an item in eBay and PropertyRoom auction. With eBay, each seller is responsible for the accurate description and prompt item shipment. With PropertyRoom the company is in control of the listing which is certainly a relief of some sort. That said however the items are used (think “out of warranty”) and similar precautions must be used when buying them.

Looking for a gadget review? Try SmartRatings.com

Published December 8th, 2007 in Money Saving Tools. 1 Comment

SmartRatings Logo Ever since I received an email from Francisco Gimenez of SmartRatings.com, I can say I am hooked up to this site. While it may be considered an average price comparison engine (functionality wise), it does great what it claims it can do: aggregating expert reviews for a wide range of consumer products.

SmartRatings uses the fact that very often when an expert reviews a product they give it a rank. What SamrtRatings then does is it normalizes the rank to 100 base scale, averages it out on per product basis, and displays it neatly in a table. Everything 80 and above gets green color, 70 and above gets yellow. Everything else is red.

I just love this simplicity and yet the power to quickly scan and judge what the gadget is worth in the eyes of a professional reviewer. What makes SmartRatings even more valuable is the ability to filter product results by manufacturer, sort them by the product release date and do many other exciting things while looking at a group of similar gadgets. This is something I have wanted to do for a long time.

Here is a hands on example. I am shopping for a Sony camcorder and am looking at a particular model. What I want to do is check what other camcorders Sony released this year, what ratings they got compared to my target model, and if there were any that ranked higher. Since SmartRatings pulls reviews from multiple sources, the comprehensive nature of the service makes sure I get the most complete picture possible.

SmartRatings Screenshot

There is a somewhat similar product review site, Wize.com, which I tested out last year. As opposite to SmartRatings, Wise.com aggregates mostly consumer reviews and has very limited set of expert reviews at hand. Another thing that irritates me with Wise.com is their filters. From the first sight they seem to give more options, some of them are product features related. But as you start trying them out, many don’t work or have incorrect options. What SmartRatings offers is a smaller set but it is just what I need when looking for a product review.

Another site worth mentioning is Retrevo. It’s user interface is more basic but it offers many more sources and in addition to reviews fetches other product related materials, e.g. manuals and forum discussions.

SmartRatings just recently launched and not all bugs have been worked out yet. For example I found that Sony camcorders are sometimes tagged as manufactured by “Sony Electronics” which skews the filter results. That said, I am planning to stick with SmartRatings for my shopping needs. There just doesn’t seem to be a better alternative right now.

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