It's a deal

Home Office Computing, Nov, 1998 by Bonny Georgia

* Narrow the field. Intenzo advises shoppers to be patient and wait for sales, use magazines and catalogs to do comparison shopping, and, most important, "narrow down your choices to two or three items you need to make finding the best price even easier."

Expert Shopper #5

Martha-Ann Berlin, chairperson of Martha-Ann's Profitable Alliances, a marketing consulting firm in Daly City, Calif. From her home office, Berlin designs results-oriented marketing strategies; she has also developed a business-to-business marketing directory on the Web.

Best Bargain Ever

August 1997: A 233MHz, 3.2GB Pentium PC with a 56Kbps modem and 24x CD-ROM drive in exchange for a service performed for the owner

How It Happened

At www.rhoram.com/barter.html, Berlin's favorite barter site, you simply post the service or product you have to barter and wait for others to contact you with an offer. "Since I work speedily and am well prepared, the time it took me to set up a joint venture for the client [who swapped the PC] was about one hour and a half, or about $750 [the cost of Berlin's time]." Berlin has also bartered her way to free ad banners, software, and other office products.

Shopping Secrets

* Bartering's better. Bartering for business equipment and supplies is an excellent way to get good things cheap. If you're interested in shopping more traditional channels, Berlin suggests enlisting the help of Usenet newsgroups such as alt.barter or comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware. "Visit the newsgroups pertaining to the product or service you want to buy," she says. "Look at the postings first, and then respond to a posting that indicates expertise on the part of the sender with a request for advice. Alternatively, you can post a request for help with details on what you want to buy. Then compare [the results]."

* The Web's the way. "My favorite way to shop for bargains is the Web," says Berlin. "Recently, I have been using direct mail only if a Web address is unavailable. [Compared to shopping retail], the speed of online information gathering, price comparison, and sheer convenience cannot be beat." To take advantage of savings while keeping your credit card and other personal information safe, shop only at online stores offering Secured Socket Layer (SSL) encryption.

RELATED ARTICLE: Hot Sites for Cool Deals

The Internet can be a penny-pincher's paradise, if you know where to look. Here's a list of our favorite free tools, shopping agents anti Web sites and services that take the work out of finding hardware and software bargains.

SHOPPING AGENTS

BidFind (www.bidfind.com): Got auction fever? BidFind searches 80 popular auction sites to tell you which ones have the product you want and at what price.

ComputerESP (www.shopper.com) This C/Net index helps you wade through prices for more than 80,000 computer hardware products advertised in Web stores.

KillerApp Express(www.killerapp.com): A supersonic shopping guide to more than 100 000 computer products with more than 1 million prices. This is the place to comparison-shop for hardware and software products across hundreds of online stores.