Why Your Good Deal Might Suck

May 13th, 2009

I’ve talked before about the art of bargain hunting, which tries to give some tips on how to find a good deal. Now I would like to take some time and tell you why your deal ain’t that hot. In fact, why it might flat out stink !

Good deals usually come from good merchants

If the merchant offering your deal is low rated and unreliable, I would avoid it. Yes, that $20 refurbished iPod deal from “Bubba’s House of Discounts” might sound like a great deal, but when you look at the user reviews, it only has one from the what looks like the Bubba himself. If you’ve never heard of the merchant try look for some signs of trust such as good merchant reviews from Pricegrabber, Shopping.com, and ResellerRatings. Yan and I like to look for contact information on the site. Crummy sites and fly-by-night operations usually don’t list this stuff. You can also do a who-is on the site to see when it was registered. If it just went up last month, run like hell.

Dubious printable coupons

Yes I would love to get 2 free double cheeseburgers at McDonalds, but that printable coupon is blurry and hosted on Divshare. Fraudulent coupons are a rapidly growing problem.. They are especially troublesome because they involve drive time to the merchant to verify if they are real. And what makes it worse is that authentic coupons are often distributed in the same means. So how do you know if the coupon is real or fake? This is tough one. What we try to do is look for a clear image of the coupon. If it’s blurry, cropped or looks photocopied it’s probably no good. Additionally if the offer seems to good to be true, it usually is. If you have time on your hands, you could call the corporate headquarters of the coupon issuer for more information (this is 50/50 shot, since a lot of companies have no idea what coupons they have floating around).

Freebies that are not free

I love freebies as much as the next guy, but it’s frustrating when you go through a bunch of forms and questions, only to realize you have to buy something or sign-up to a subscription of some service. Real freebies don’t have an associated cost. On a side note, freebies with Google Adsense ads on the sign-up page are usually no good. Often the freebie is just a fraud and the website owner is looking make money on ads or just collect email addresses for spam.

Lame deal of the day sites

When Woot came around they were a breathe of fresh air to the hot deal community. Woot is funny, reliable, and great deals. However, since Woot’s amazing success, there have been a rush of knock-off sites offering similar one day deals. This is not to say that all of the Woot knock-off sites have been bad, but some of them have been flaky at best. Again I would advise you to look for tell-tale signs of reputation on these sites similar to the ones I mentioned in #1. A growing trend among these impostors is offering something for free that is worth a $1, and charging $6 shipping. Buyer beware indeed.

No value and limited value deals are a waste of time

What do I consider limited value deals? Well for beginners, deals that are available in less than 10 states. How about a 50% off coupon, but it’s the same 50% off coupon available every single weekend with a new expiration date. Another one that I like is “Free Shipping on orders over $200!” Well, these maybe coupons and discounts, but the value just isn’t there. Do some research on the deal, and really ask yourself what you are getting with this deal. Your answer might be it’s just not worth it.

Hope you enjoyed these tips, and maybe it will save you some money and heartache in the future. At Buxr we give you a lot of tools to assist you on your bargain hunting quest like:

• Pricegrabber price comparison on most deals
• Price history
• Advance search for current and expiring deal
• Related deals
• And browsing via tags

Good luck,

Mike @ Buxr

Image courtesy of Flickr

Entry Filed under: General