How to Find Low Prices for Gadgets

Everyone wants to find low prices for their products, especially their gadgets. While we believe the right answer to finding the lowest gadget prices is to keep checking this website. Our data initiatives are going to scan the web for the lowest prices. But it is always helpful to know how to find low prices for gadgets on your own.

Finding the lowest prices for gadgets may seem easy but can be tricky. That’s because there are a lot of gadgets that have a low price, but the quality is not good. The companies that sell these products often use the latest search engines techniques to increase their rank.

The companies that are successful in increasing their ranks will appear on the first page of search. You’ll be lured into these websites by the low prices, but you have to be careful. With gadgets, you often get what you pay for.

Watch Out For Shipping Costs

Many sellers drop their prices significantly only to balloon the shipping costs. Sometimes, you end up paying even more than sellers with regular prices and free shipping. Luckily, many selling platforms (like Amazon) offer free shipping for purchases totaling $25 or more. Other platforms don’t do this.

If you go on eBay, for instance, you’ll find plenty of sellers who try this tactic, i.e., extremely low prices with huge shipping costs. What’s worse is these sellers get you to spend a lot of time reading through their listings and it isn’t until you go to purchase that you find out how much you’re going to pay. Some customers are likely to buy because they don’t want to go through the buying process again. But it taints the reputation of the sellers.

Always Check Ratings and Reviews

Deciphering ratings and reviews is almost an art unto itself. Sellers often pay people to leave great reviews, even though it’s against the terms of service of many selling platforms. Some sellers engage is ratings exchanges with different sellers.

While figuring out the reviews are a challenge, you can use the following tips to help you get a handle on what is legitimate:

• Look for many reviews. Four or five high reviews are not as strong an indicator as hundreds. With several reviews, you’ll start to find reviewers who tell the truth and are not being influenced by arrangements with the sellers.
• Check reviews of multiple websites – even ones you aren’t going to purchase from.
• Ignore reviews from people who are vague in their descriptions.
• Some buyers like to disregard the lowest (one-star) and highest (5-star) ratings. I personally don’t recommend this because you can gain a lot of insight from both of these levels of ratings. Once you learn how to filter out the junk, you’ll have a better feel for who is telling the truth.
• Some sites (like Amazon) specify which reviewers are actual purchasers of the products. It is possible for people to buy from other sites and review it on different websites. However, you’ll know for sure when the platform specifies actual buyers.
• Look for the date of the ratings or reviews. If you see a bunch of ratings from unverified sellers within the same date range, within weeks or a few months, then you should proceed with caution on that product.
• Pay attention to sellers who respond to customer reviews. Some platforms will allow sellers to respond. You want to look for sellers that are accomodating and don’t take the reviews too personally. If the seller gets petty in their responses, they may hurl that in your direction, too.
• On some platforms, you can check out other products that some of the reviewers have left reviews for. This can give you an indications of serial reviewers. These are people that always leave great reviews or always leave horrible reviews. This can help you discount some of these reviews. Be aware that they still may be legitimate reviews. It’s just something to be aware of, however.

Sometimes, when you find a product that passes the tests for the review process, you may be willing to pay a little more money because your confidence in the product increases.

Save a Copy of the Sales Page

You don’t have to do this with all products, but with gadgets it can be important. You want to make sure when you are ready to buy, that you are receiving everything that is advertised in the sales page. Sometimes, sales pages go away or change, so if you don’t save a copy, you’ll have difficulty presenting your case to the customer service.

Choose Sellers that Are Established

Low prices are meaningless if you find fly-by-night sellers. These sellers make a few sales and disappear before giving customers the chance to complain. The prices are low, but the quality is bad, and the sellers are nowhere to be found.

These practices continue because it’s difficult for law enforcement and government agencies to track these bad practices. The situation is less likely to happen with established sellers.

You can look online in forums, social media, and blogs for information about established sellers. Customers will often express their experiences (usually more bad than good, unfortunately) on these platforms. Some websites, like TrustPilot and Yelp, allow people to post when they are disgruntled with purchases or sellers.

Agencies and Consumer Websites

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will look into serious complaints from customers. However, you won’t find every complaint on this website because the agency usually handles the bigger complaints.

The Better Business Bureau is a good place to find more granular complaints. Understand, though, the the BBB is not a government agency. Still, it can offer insight into products that customers have purchased and any associated complaints.

Consumer Reports (CR) reviews many gadgets and can be a great place to learn more about the tests that the company has performed on the products. However, the reviews about CR have been mixed lately, so take the reports with a grain of salt.

Check Coupon Sites

Coupon codes or promotion codes are great for saving money. When you take advantages of online coupon codes, it can help keep prices low.

You may think why don’t vendors simply make the prices of their products lower.  It’s a valid puzzle, but one that has been solved by the department store chain JC Penney. A few years back, the company announced an initiative to cut out coupons and offer products at the lowest prices possible. Consumers hated it. The company took a major hit on sales.

Our brains are wired to seek out deals. Having said this, it can take some time to find coupon codes that work. Some people complain that they can spend ten or fifteen minutes scouring though coupon code sites only to find none of them work.

You’ll have to decide if it’s worth it to look for these codes. Often, the higher the price of the products, the more worth it to search for them. It doesn’t make sense to spend fifteen minutes to save one dollar on a five-dollar product. But it can be worth it to save 60% on a $300 product.

If you are wondering if coupon codes ever work, they do. I have saved a boatload of money using them. It can take time to find good ones, but often the savings are significant.

There are some coupon companies that are offering plugins to web browsers (like Chrome). These may save you a little time when trying to apply coupons to your purchases, but they aren’t perfect. I have tried a few in the past and at least one of them slowed down my browser. Extensions and add-ons have their use, but too many of them are counterproductive.

Buying Products from Other Countries

We live in a global economy, right? Then, it makes sense to at least check out possible vendors in other countries. For starters, take a look at Alibaba.com. It has many products for sale at low prices.

But shopping outside your jurisdiction is not without its hassles. You’ll need to pay attention to laws regarding the sale of goods elsewhere. This includes local laws and the laws of those other jurisdiction. There could be paperwork on some products that you’ll need to file.

Oversight from other countries is often lacking. This means you could be stuck with damaged goods or worse, you could be selling illegal items unwittingly. As with anything unknown, proceed with caution.

One way to approach the purchase of products from other countries is to learn about sourcing products as if you are going to resell them. It will take a bit of effort, but you’ll learn the ins-and-outs of buying from these countries. It could even lead to a side hustle that could earn you cash. Of course, this will be relevant only if you plan on many gadget purchases in the future. The effort required probably won’t be justified for one or two product purchases.

Stores that Match or Beat Prices

One discouraging aspect of buying products is when they become available for a lower price after you buy. The good news is many stores (both online and brick-and-mortar) will offer to match the price if this happens. You often have to prove where you found the lower price, but that is not too difficult. In most cases, you can send the link of the website where you found the lower price.

You may wonder how stores can make matching agreements with you. After all, if they lower their price, their profits margins will take a hit. And yes, this is true. However, vendors know that most people are too busy to be bothered with the process. You have to search for a lower price. Then, you have to contact the store and negotiate for the matching. Some stores may even be willing to lower the price below the matched price as an incentive for you not to return the product.

Product Comparison Websites

Several websites offer services to compare prices on your behalf. You can certainly find some great prices with these websites. However, you’ll need to approach this with care. Often, the deal sites make their money when you purchase through the links on their website. These are known as affiliate links.

There is nothing inherently wrong with affiliate links or how these deal sites make money. However, they may only include vendors where there is an affiliate relationship. Lower prices could be available on websites that don’t offer an affiliate arrangement. Therefore, you could be missing out on even bigger deals than published by these websites.

These websites often don’t monitor the quality of the vendors, although they often do publish ratings for the products sold by the vendors. These websites are often useful to get a ballpark range of prices.

Always Check Amazon, Walmart, and eBay

Amazon and Walmart are aggressive competitors. For several years, Amazon had an edge in the online world. Now, Walmart is spending a good portion of its budget on its eCommerce initiatives. Check both Amazon and Walmart for the products you are considering buying. Another good website to check is eBay.

Don’t Want to Go Through All This When Researching Products?

Our website is here to help you get the lowest prices on your gadget purchases. If you are not keen on spending a lot of time researching products you’re considering, we will do it for you. While we cannot guarantee the lowest prices (as they change frequently) we do a fair amount of research to give you several choices that should save you as much as possible.

In many cases, the products we profile will include more than one store for your consideration. We do all the research. We also cannot publish the prices on this website (except in rare instances). Because the prices change too frequently, we could cause problems for the vendors if we publish them. However, we’ll try to keep the prices as low as possible with the quality as high as possible.

We are not product testers, though. We will often reference companies that provide this information. But we don’t necessarily buy the products and review them. We are more of a product research service than product reviews. Always check product reviewers to make sure they have purchased or obtained the product. If these companies state that it’s a product review, ask about their relationship with the vendors.

How Much Does this Service Cost?

For our readers, most of the products profiles here are free. For special requests, we will charge based on the extent of the request.