Tired of the con artist mentality in the stores? It's On Sale! -- Not!. 20% OFF. OFF What? You save $20? Really? Probably not.
At For Serious Shoppers we`re tired of it too, so we have done our due diligence to find a solution.
There are some really good bargains out there, by honest merchants, and if you're a Serious Shopper, let us help you find them.
Everyone knows not to trust a used car salesman, but common sales tactics have been trying to fool you, everywhere, for decades. Now with sales moving to on-line and with Artificial Intelligence employed you're being lied to at an ever increasing rate.
As the articles below indicate that has been a lot of chatter, and some legal action, to force merchants to be honest, to just tell the truth, when they say something is a sale.
Click on any image in the right panel to read the referenced articles.
Even with a barrage of negative press, some legal action by various State Attorney Generals, and guidance by the Federal Trade Commission, not much has changed. The practice of just making up numbers and calling it a Sale is such a long standing practice among the majority of merchants, they just don`t know what else to do. There is more on that phenomenon in our previous article here: MSRP: Crime or Cluster F***
At For Serious Shoppers we have developed our own propitiatory Price Ranking Algorithm. It works in a manner similar to how Search Engines rank websites. Our algorithm is explained further here: How Do We Calculate Your Price Rank?
To a certain extent, yes, but for the most part, no. The reason is that it`s impossible to collect enough information to make a true comparison between competing offers. For example:
Lets say you're looking to buy a Yellow Neoprene Bikini. You find the one you're looking for at two stores. The brand is the same. The description is the same. The UPC bar code is the same. In fact they were both made by the same manufacturer and are in the original manufacturers packaging.
The problem is that one of them was made 2 months ago and the other one has been sitting in a hot Asian warehouse for the past two years where the color has faded and the folds have become a permanent crease. By all considerations they should be the same thing, but they are not.
There is no data on the merchants website, or anywhere else, to indicate how old those items are.
So why do we spend our time collecting all this data, crunching it and formatting it in a manner that can be useful to you, and save you money? One reason is that we believe it's an important public service, we have the skills and the time to do it, so we should do it. It's also something that we find interesting and enjoyable to be doing. Data collection and analysis is usually considered a mind numbing boring process, but we like it.
Although we do not have an affiliate relationship with all the merchants that we track, we do have an affiliate relationship with some of them. If you purchase an item from a merchant after having linked to that merchants store from our site, there is a chance that we will receive a small commission on the sale.
These commissions are very very small, but if we get a lot of traffic we will get a reasonable compensation for our efforts. These commissions do not change your price in any way.
If you don't see items you are interested in click the Contact link and tell us about it. We will try to find it and track it for you.
Here are some links to articles that we read when researching this topic.