A Power Shopper - Become One

Shopping is a necessary part of living, but instead of fearing it as a necessary evil, how would you like to become a power shopper?

We all need food, shelter, clothing, and so on. Some people just naturally are very organized hunter-gatherers, and always seem to find the best deals Others wander around the malls and mega stores for hours and hours, and only come away exhausted and discouraged. Can the latter become a power shopper like the first, or is it a caste system you have to be born into?

Great news! You can train yourself to become a power shopper too! With Internet shopping online it just gets easier all the time. The prerequisite is that you must be ready to think of it as seriously as a job or a small business you own. You have to give some time to it, and be thorough. That means it may take some time, if by nature you are very spontaneous and impulsive. But if you are determined to learn and you keep at it, your style of shopping will shift more and more towards orderly savings and good buys. You'll get addicted to bragging to friends on your great purchases.

8 Stages in Becoming a Power Shopper

Make Lists, or a Budget

Even if you say you don't like to carry around lists, I bet you carry some around in your head that you don't even notice. Whether your lists are on paper or in your head, - or even on your computer in a spreadsheet - it doesn't matter, as long as you get a good grasp of the things you need to buy. For yourself personally, for your home, for your family, what things do you need to buy at regular or semi-regular times? Divide these into sub-categories if you want to be more thorough.

Now ask yourself; how much can I afford to spend on each category per week, per month or per year? If you have big expenses like car insurance, a new bed, or even a car or house, how can you divide up the cost and spread it into your plan so you will have your payments ready on time?

Check your lists over a few days. Did you forget to work in school books? How about dental work?

Guess what. As you look over your lists you may realize that you have created a budget. It doesn't have to have hard lines drawn in cement. A power shopper has a budget just to keep your spending in guidelines that allow you to have enough for everything important, and a margin for pleasures. (Mind you, sometimes we have to do without the pleasures for a while until we've built up the income flow).

Power Shop to Spend Less than You Expected

This is where power shopping can turn into a game where you try to beat your budget. Research especially the big ticket items online (later you'll do it with the small stuff too), to see if you can find it somewhere for less than you had expected to spend. Every time you do, you'll enjoy a thrill and victory. Shopping online makes this stage so much easier, for both offline and online purchases. Check out your local stores' websites, check out the big name brands, and look for discount sites and rebates and coupons. Compare features, prices, and even what other buyers think about the product once they got it. Did they have hassles at a particular store? Then you'll know to avoid that one.

Chart the Best Sales

Want to do still better? Make yourself a hand-drawn chart or a computer spreadsheet to show when certain stores or chains have their best sales. For instance, many of them schedule their bedding and linens and housewares sales for January. Some places have 50-80- or even 90% off the week right after Christmas. When you find out about it, mark it on your chart. If you have things in your budget that you only need once a year and can wait until that sale season, hold off buying until then.

Some downtown shopping area all go together for a big July Sidewalk sale when they drag lots of clothes and shoes out onto the street and slash prices. Maybe you want to schedule a clothes buying spree for that time of year and at that sale.

Did you know that the online stores have their version of such sales too? Since online shopping puts a world market place at your fingertips, it may take a bit longer to discover these trends and mark them on your chart, so see your chart as an ongoing project that you keep fine-tuning and improving.

Isn't it maddening to buy a digital camera because you spotted such a cute one, and then find the next week it is a loss leader in that same store, and it's going for 50% off? Ouch! That's why a power shopper uses restraint and doesn't do impulse buying for the most part. She plans ahead, and checks out all the options. And then sometimes just waits and watches patiently.

(Here's where I should mention Daniel's book on Shopping for Free Groceries. Now that will make you a power shopper for sure!)

Schedule Your Spending Times

Do your research in the weeks leading up to a major holiday on the calendar. Then, as the holiday creeps up, play closer attention at your favourite or designated shopping sites for those sales to be announced.

In fact, sometimes when you are dealing with a friendly, talkative sales assistant you'll hear hints about when their regular sales come up. That will happen mostly in an offline store. However, in the online world, if you can take time to follow the blogs or ezines of your favourite stores, you'll sometimes see the hints dropped there. Don't expect to remember these tips; write them into your chart! Such knowledge increases your power as a smart shopper.

Use your cool, objective mind to discern the true difference between clearance, liquidation and seasonal sales. After a while you'll be your own best authority on them.

Plan Power Shopping Expeditions (holidays?)

Sometimes you will discover that a certain area has some super-duper sales over a week or a month. Perhaps all the stores in a mall or community go together to draw in customers. When this is in a physical area you might plan a vacation so you can do some power shopping offline. Some time it will happen that you discover a similar trend or period of sales online. That might be a good time to take off some days, and without the costs of travel for a vacation, you can spend that time visiting shopping sites online, and comparing and doing some mega-power-shopping. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to spend every last cent to your name. Remember, you have those lists, or that budget to go by, and there will be other sales in the future. Be a sensible power-shopper, not a beserk spendthrift who is out of control.

Record Your Savings

Some people can always remember the regular price of almost anything. As I get older, this gets harder for me. So I have to jot these things down as I compare prices. Knowing the regular price helps us to recognize a truly good sale price when we see one. But you know after a while we forget the great deals we snapped up. It pays to record them on some little chart or card we carry with us, or have on our computer. Even when entering our purchases in our bookkeeping system, if we can jot into the memo area how much we saved, it will help us later to have proof we are a good power-shopper. So work up a system in the beginning before you get too set in your routines, to record how much you saved in your shopping online.

These numbers will help you when reasoning with others about the value of your purchases. (Unfortunately, they don't say much about your motives or wisdom in selection; that's another story).

Bookmark Your Shopping Route

In your physical offline shopping world, you have likely a mental list of which store you visit one after the other when out on a shopping trip. The ones in the same area or mall will get visited the same day, right? Well, as an online power shopper, it is smart to make a list of bookmarks of your favourite stores. If you register as a shopper on those sites, they often let your bookmark your favourite items so that when logged in you can get to those with just a click or two. Organize these bookmarks and try to keep them updated. You can even divide them into categories in your bookmarks (Favourites), so that when you want to visit all your favourite electronics stores to do a quick comparison on one item, you can click on "Open All in Tabs" (this is in Firefox browser). Presto, then all those stores' sites open at once in a row of tabs. You can switch from one to the other as you check to see which ones are selling that item, and for what prices.

You can do the same with your main shopping bots or price comparison sites. Or, with all your favourite shoe stores. Whatever. At this stage you are streamlining your power shopping so that you can do it faster and faster!

Power Shopping Second-hand Items

You might think at first that you'll still have to run down to your local Sally Ann or Value Village to buy second-hand things. No. They are online too! This is where you learn to shop at eBay and other auction sites. This is completely different ball game in many ways. We'll use another page when we get into that.

I'd rather have someone else pay the big prices on new shoes, and to break them in for me. Then I go looking for them in the second-hand stores where the price is more my budget style. But I need to learn to do this online at the auction sites I'm not a very confident auction buyer.

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