Don’t get ripped off when buying tech online How to get the best deals when shopping on the web
PARTT 2 WHEN from online stores
It must be a good deal, it’s on Amazon – right? Not necessarily. Buying online lulls us all into a false sense of good value. Not only are prices often on a par with (or more than) prices on the high street (whose rip-off tactics we covered on these pages in Issue 479) but you also pay for postage. Then there’s the mysterious “handling” fee. Right, because sticking a DVD into a jiffy bag is such hard work. In this second part of our series, we expose the tricks online retailers use to overcharge you, and how you can avoid falling into their traps. bargain, with its crossed-out RRP (recommended retail price) of £179.99 (see screenshot left). Then we searched for Vivitar’s 786HD Gopro-alike camcorder, and found it for £39 at Currys and £49.99 at Amazon.
So rather than head straight for Amazon, visit a price-comparison site. Pricechecker ( www.pricechecker.co.uk) and Pricerunner ( www.pricerunner. co.uk) are very reliable when it comes to bargain-hunting for PCS, electronic goods and appliances. Megashopbot ( www. megashopbot.com) goes one further by comparing the price-checkers, and is always worth a visit before you shell out for a big-ticket item such as a new TV or laptop.
Be aware that these sites aren’t always great at distinguishing between different models, so double-check they are pricing the model you want by visiting a few of their recommended stores. The Lenovo Tab 2 A10, for example, has a cheaper 10in version that may cause confusion.
Buy at the right time
Amazon regularly lowers prices from one day to the next, and other online shops will quickly follow suit. It’s an accelerated version of high-street economics.
A new school of price-checkers has emerged to reflect this. The brilliant Camelcamelcamel ( http://uk. camelcamelcamel.com) lets you track the price of a specific item on Amazon over a number of days. It also has a free Chrome extension ( www.snipca.com/21049).
Simply paste a product’s Amazon URL into Camelcamelcamel to see how its
price has changed over the past few months. The dramatic swings may surprise you. Our Lenovo Tab 2 A10, currently £139.95, peaked at £179.99 several times - just before Christmas (predictably enough), but there were also spikes in October and early March (see screenshot above). It fell to a low of £119 in February. And what about the Vivitar 786HD camcorder? A dramatic high of £88 in July and a respectable low of £39 in January. The message seems to be: buy in winter, but wait until after Christmas.
If you don’t want to wait until January, enter a price you’re willing to pay into Camelcamelcamel and the website will notify you by email when Amazon’s price drops to that level. Amazon is quick to match other prices online, hence its wildly fluctuating price tags. The same doesn’t apply to Amazon’s third-party sellers, who use Amazon as a platform, much like market traders – and their prices are seldom bargains. A Nikon Coolpix L340 camera is £99.99 from Argos and costs £199.99 plus £6.98 delivery from the Amazon seller ‘Bestline’ (see screenshot below left). The camera isn’t in stock on Amazon’s own shelves.
Be especially wary of second-hand deals. Amazon’s Marketplace is a cosier, safer and more expensive alternative to ebay for third-party sellers. The higher cost to sellers is passed on to you. That Nikon Coolpix, for example, costs £100+£4.46 and upwards from secondhand sellers on Amazon. What’s more, your consumer rights shrink when you buy second-hand from a private seller (see box above right). In the first part of this series (Issue 479), we warned against buying overpriced accessories and warranties on the high street, and the same applies when shopping online. Custom PC sites let you order only the components you want. However, their prices are often as high as off-the-shelf goods from PC World and Amazon.
We visited Uk-based site Chillblast ( www. chillblast.com), and didn’t stay long. It’s the place to build the high-end PC of your dreams, but it’s not exactly bargain central. PC Specialist ( www.pcspecialist.co.uk) is more budgetfriendly, but don’t be fooled. We used the site’s wizard to “build” an AMD dual-core PC with 500GB hard drive and 2GB memory for £297 - then found PCS with similar specs for lower prices on PC World.
Do watch out for pre-ticked extras when buying a PC off the shelf. Dell’s website recommended we add £96.97 (‘Premium Support’) to our £599 PC while we were checking out (see screenshot above). Don’t be tempted by such offers and stick to the free one-year warranty.
AYou won’t find XP SP3 anywhere on the Microsoft Download Centre, at www.snipca.com/ 20924, because official support for Windows XP ended in April 2014. However, for now at least, the download is still available on legitimate servers run by Microsoft — you just need to know where and how to look.
Microsoft has a little-known website called Update Catalog (see screenshot). It’s a relic of a previous Windows era, and Microsoft built it to help systems administrators roll out updates across networks. The site is still active but you’ll need to install an Activex control to use it. This means it works only in Internet Explorer (IE) — because Activex is itself an obsolete technology. More specifically, it requires the desktop version of IE, so don’t bother trying to use it with the Modern version from the Windows Store.
Using the desktop version of IE, visit www.snipca.com/20926 and accept the Activex installation request. Search for ‘Windows XP Service Pack 3’, or just use the code KB936929. Click the Add button, then click the ‘view basket’ link at the top right, followed by Download.