One Habit that Saves Money Every Time!

I'm going to share this little secret with you. More and more of us are doing online transactions now. While the price discovery has increased and when these informed shoppers surf the web hunting for their next prestigious purchase, they sometimes ignore that there is still a possibility to improve (at least on price, if not quality). How I shop is really to look for the options in my top 4-5 websites first. Then is the time for 'the habit', I search for the currently available discount coupons for the websites on the internet. There are literally a tonnes of sites now that list down all possible discount coupons that are currently active on shopping/travel sites. This is just free money, and I don't understand why people are in such a rush that they wouldn't search for these offers.

For many websites, because of such easy price discovery and further predatory pricing by the big guys (Amazon, etc.) it is really tough to differentiate and hence there are two possible ways to compete. They either become a niche player on something (say a gym supplements supplier), and try to get better ranked on search engines while trying to still compete on price with the big guys. Or the other possibility, that's easier for most of the guys and sometimes the only possible one when they don't want to operate in a niche, is to differentiate on price. This includes how they provide heavy discounts to attract new shoppers to their websites.

I feel the web is a completely different game when it comes to e-commerce or travel bookings. When a decade ago the main feature of competition among businesses was location, that has changed completely. That is going to further change in the coming decade. How the businesses used to have spatial advantage is soon going to go away and with more and more online presence only the truly good (both on quality and on price) businesses are the ones that are going to survive. But, at present the problem is about getting discovered, about getting there name recognized, and these coupons and giveaways are only a small price to pay for the bigger growth expected out of these. Well, for thrifty shoppers like myself it’s an opportunity. I'd just request you to be careful, because there are bad guys out there in e-commerce as well. So, you have to be able to differentiate which deals are 'too good' to be true.