Becoming a creative online shopper, Shop Online the Lazy Way

Advanced techniques--Becoming a Creative Online Shopper

by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com

The following article is based on the introduction from Shop Online the Lazy Way, a book written by Richard Seltzer, which was published in August 1999 by Macmillan. It is available in paperback directly from our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat or from Amazon.com. It is also available in a Braille edition from National Braille Press (www.nbp.org).

Now that the rights have reverted to the author, he is free to update and revise this online version. Please send email to alert him of changes and interesting new sites that you have encountered.

Congratulations. Having mastered the navigation techniques discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, you are now ready to join the community of Internet online shoppers. Once you become part of this special group of people, then you'll begin to realize the true benefits of the Internet. By sharing openly, you gain access to the wisdom, experience, insights, and fellowship of tens of thousands of other online shoppers who have interests similar to yours.

Just tens of thousands of people? Not millions? Only a small percentage of those who shop online actively participate in the online community. Most online shoppers just pass through their shopping experience, buying one thing here and another there. But I hope that you'll aspire to more than that, wanting to achieve the truly active effortlessness that comes when you make online shopping an integral part of your life and identity. You'll live it, you'll breathe it, you'll love it. What the heck, it's fun.

What do we mean by the online shopping community? The Internet offers a variety of ways by which you can and should interact with other shoppers, and not just with shopping carts and credit-card transaction processing programs. Here is a brief summary:

Chat is "real time" dialogue that occurs on the Internet between several people who are online simultaneously in the same chat area. In that chat area, you will be able to see what other participants type and they see what you type--live--as it's happening in real time.
Forums are like bulletin boards. You post a message. Somebody comes by later and posts a response. Somebody else responds to that response. Over the course of days, weeks, months, years, threads of discussion grow.
With email distribution lists, you "subscribe" to receive and send email messages in a given subject area. These email distribution lists are sent by and to other online participants who also subscribe.
With newsgroups (also known as "Usenet newsgroups"), you can post and read messages in a given subject area without having "subscribed," simply by going to the right place within the newsgroup to read.

Using one of more of these mechanisms, you can help and be helped by others like yourself, getting recommendations and giving advice that you will gain from your own Internet experiences.

What it means to be a "full player"

When you first ventured online, you probably had some misgivings about all these stores run by unknown people. After all, how can you know where these stores are, who the people are who run them, and whether they'll actually produce the goods they promise. But you aren't alone in your online shopping experience out there in Cyberland. Rather than "buyer beware," it's the vendors who should be wary--regardless of how big or small the store, or how well-known or obscure the company happens to be. You see, the online vendors are at the mercy of active and involved customers, like you, who openly share information about their shopping experiences. If the online vendor messes up, word spreads fast among the online shopping community, and that vendor's business dries up.

Once you know how this online community stuff works, you should also consider becoming a full player:

With your own Web pages, you can publish recipes, tips, or experiences: ideas and advice of all kinds, as well as lists of collectibles for which you are looking. Invite the entire world to take a look at your Web pages.
For about $100 per month, rather than depending on auctions and classifieds, you could use the lessons you've learned as an online shopper to open your own online store to sell your mother's jewelry or your wife's herbal tea. That's the base price that Yahoo! Store (store.yahoo.com) charges today to let you sell up to 50 different products in their store-front area. Or course, that doesn't include the time you might put in or other related costs (like getting a merchant credit card account). But they are aiming to make building and running an online store as simple as possible for beginners. [The offer at Amazon's zShops zshops.amazon.com is similar.]

A Word of Caution Before You Dive In

The Internet is about connecting people to people. It also happens to allow you to make purchases and to access enormous quantities of information, but connecting people to people is the heart of the matter.

As you meet new people in newsgroups, forums, and chat sessions, you can benefit from their advice and suggestions, and you can help others as well. Just remember that people are people even in cyberspace: with all their good and bad traits. You should proceed with caution, listening more often than talking, until you've had enough online experience to develop cyber-street- smarts.

You have learned to proceed cautiously when approached by a street hawker or a door-to-door salesperson or when you get an unsolicited phone call from a stranger. You need to get used to the Internet equivalent of these encounters, to sense when you should hold back and when you should be open and sharing.

Chat in a Hat--for Immediacy

As you pass through portals, and browse through shopping malls, lingering at large and interesting stores, you will repeatedly see a hyperlinked phrase including the word "chat." Click on it to enter the local chat room and join in the live discussions happening there. Often these rooms are wide open 24-hours a day with people randomly dropping in and talking about whatever's on their mind. But some have scheduled events, with a host to keep the discussion moving in helpful directions and appearances by experts or celebrities. For example, Yahoo!'s forthcoming chat events include talks about fitness, heart disease, and celebrity chats with soap opera stars.

In most cases, you first will arrive at a registration page, where you apply for a password, or you can just sign in, then click to enter and immediately join in the discussion. Sometimes your browser software will suffice for you to participate in the chat room's activity. Other times, you will be given instructions on how to download special chat software. Unfortunately, there are dozens of different chat programs, and different sites use different ones. Don't sweat it. Follow the instructions you find at each chat room. Just dive in--read and react. It won't take long for you to get the drift of how it works, and when you come to the same chat room for the second time, it will be even easier to join in.

In most cases, you type your messages in a form, and in a viewing area you see what you and others have been saying. You'll also see hyperlink buttons to click on to submit what you've typed or to change the look-and-feel of the page for your convenience. If you are confused, check the chat room's Help files. Better yet, speak up. Type what you are thinking. Ask your questions and let the folks like you who are connected help you. Once you start participating in the chat, just go with the flow of activities. You'll be surprised how soon this seemingly stilted and awkward communication mechanism becomes second nature to you. You'll almost start "hearing" it. (Imagine telegraph operators in the days when Edison was young, who heard words when the uninitiated just heard clicks.)

This medium is great when you need suggestions for a gift, or advice on what is the best of this or that, or tips on the best place to get what you need. When you have a question and need an immediate answer, or just need to vent to and relate with people in the same kind of circumstances, give chat rooms a try.

If by chance, the first chat room you enter is empty or the people rub you wrong, try another. If you are really unlucky that day, and the second try flops, too; then come join in my chat program about Business on the World Wide Web. Check www.samizdat.com/chat.html for details. We'll help get you started with chat and answer other questions you might have about online shopping.

Forums--for Thoughtful Reasoned Dialogue

Forums let you carry on discussions across barriers of time as well as space. Your crazy schedule and time zone differences needn't get in the way of your discussing recipes or disk drives with an online friend in Thailand. Because you aren't faced with the urgency of everyone being connected to the Internet at once (like you are with chat rooms), you can pause and reflect and even edit your question or answer or comment before posting it to the forum. Days, weeks, maybe even months later, you'll be able to go back and see what you said, and what was said in response, as well as whether the conversation went any further from there. You might even tell your friends about this discussion and ask them to take a look and add their thoughts.

Where do you find forums? You'll see links to some of them at portals and malls and major shopping sites. Or you can go to ForumOne www.forumone.com, which has a searchable directory of over 225,000 Web-based forum discussions. They also list several hundred recommended forums, organized by categories.

To participate in a forum, you don't need any plug-ins or different software. All you need is a Web browser.

Email Via Distribution Lists: When You Know the Subject--Not the People

Imagine sending a letter not specifically to "James and Joyce," but rather to "everybody who is really interested in antiques." That's what happens with public email distribution lists.

Many of these email distribution lists use automated software, so you sign on and off with a standard message to a particular address. The smaller distribution lists have posting addresses, and everything sent there by a subscriber gets automatically forwarded to the entire subscriber list. The larger distribution lists have one or more moderators who filter the mail and perhaps put the best postings together into "digest" messages.

A public email distribution list's audience is typically a few hundred people and sometimes as large as a few thousand. The larger the subscriber group, the more likely the list will have moderator; otherwise, you could get so many emails from the group that they became a nuisance rather than a help.

How do you find these public email distribution lists? Go to "Liszt, the mailing list directory" www.liszt.com. (That's not a typo; this site spells its name like the name of the Hungarian composer). The searchable directory includes over 90,000 public email lists that you can join. This Web site also provides a recommended subset, organized by category.

Search Liszt for "antiques," and you'll find four matches. Click on the category "business," then "shopping," and you'll find:

Giftgiving: help for the gift-giving challenged (e.g., helping men find gift ideas for women.)
The Internet Cheapskate Newsletter: information on free and cheap Internet services.
McDonaldSv: surplus items for office, home, work, at low prices.
RummageFun: for selling anything and everything, like a big yard or rummage sale.
Shopping: weekly updates of online shopping opportunities.

Newsgroups: Reach Out to an Even Broader Community

With newsgroups (known to pre-Web Internet veterans as "Usenet newsgroups"), you post a message to a group, using either a special newsgroup software, email, or a web-based service. The audience for a particular group might be tens of thousands, or maybe even hundreds of thousands of readers, but most of the postings are likely to come from the same handful of outspoken and prolific writers. The messages are stored on numerous "news servers" (computers around the world that have been set up on a volunteer basis for the dedicated purpose of acting as the hardware hosts of newsgroups. Postings are typically available for about four to eight weeks, depending on the policies and whims of the folks who run the servers. The discussions are usually "threaded," similar to forums, where the newsgroup's subject line makes clear one messages is in response to another one, and so on. The most useful messages often get posted to multiple newsgroups, forwarded over email distribution lists, and eventually posted on the Web by fans, sometimes at multiple Web sites.

Liszt also has a newsgroup directory. But the most comprehensive source of information about newsgroups is Deja.com (www.deja.com). On peak days, this Web site processes over a million postings from hundreds of thousands of people to over 50,000 different newsgroups. [This number keeps growing.]

Click on "New Users" at the bottom of Deja's first page for information on how to get the most out of their free service. This Web site makes it easy for you to find and read the items you want and also to post items to any of these groups. Some examples of advice or information you can post requested responses for are as varied as looking for a rare collectible or seeking advice on what DVD system to buy.

Web Pages: Make Your Own and Let People Find You

Millions of people like you have created their own Web sites, using free space provided by their Internet service providers or by portal sites like Geocities www.geocities.com, Tripod www.tripod.com, and Xoom www.xoom.com [now NBCi www.nbci.com]. The service that gives you the free web space will also provide you with basic tools and advice for creating and posting your Web pages.

I've created my own Web site, myself; and over the last three and a half years, I've built my site to include over 900 documents, some of which are entire books. In any typical week, about 4000 people visit my site, most of whom found their way to my site by using search engines. Often, they are looking for advice about doing business on the Internet or using the AltaVista search engine; or they have read a book or author that I've read or mentioned. Some also come looking for my online shopping directory, which has links to all the sites mentioned in this book www.samizdat.com/shopping.html

But, why would you want to create and maintain your own Web site? Here are some great reasons:

Post lists of what you want to buy so sellers can find you.
Share with others hyperlinked lists of sites that you want to recommend (perhaps with your personal reviews).
Post useful content related to areas of particular interest to you, so others with similar interests will find your pages and then contact you.
Take advantage of affiliates and associates programs offered by stores where you buy frequently, so you can get discounts on what you buy yourself and also get referral fees (cash or merchandise credit) when people click from one of your pages to that store and then buy something.

By the way, if you are curious about affiliate/associates programs and how they work, check at Amazon.com. They have hundreds of thousands of associates--mostly people like you who have their own Web pages and mention books and music that they like, with links to Amazon.com for the convenience of others who might want to buy them. If those visitors do buy, the referral fee ranges from 5 to 15 percent, depending on how much of a discount the customer is getting. For details, check www.amazon.com/associates, and see Chapter 4 here, where we deal with books, music, and videos.

For ideas on what to include in your Web site and why, how to design your pages, and how to publicize your site for free over the Internet, check my book, The Social Web, which is available for free at www.samizdat.com/#social. For now, book is only available in electronic form. You can read it at my Web site, and save and print it, just like you would any other Web page. You can also buy it on diskette from Amazon.com.

Opening Your Own Online Store

Having experienced online shopping as a consumer, and having created your own Web pages, you might be tempted to open your own little online store, especially considering that the cost of starting a small online store is very little. For instance, at Yahoo! Store store.yahoo.com, running a store selling up to 50 items currently costs only about $100 a month. Additionally, Yahoo! Store charges no startup fee and no per-transaction fees, and you do not have to make any minimum time commitment.

While you can expect other companies to make similar offers, Yahoo! Store is leading the way in making it easy for ordinary people to open and run small online stores. Yahoo! Store already has over 280,000 products listed [number growing rapidly], and this mall-style colelction of stores gets millions of page views per month. Shoppers can do a single search across all the stores. A single "shopping basket" keeps track of your choices, as you move from store to store within the site. And Yahoo! Store enables secure credit card transactions. As one of their store keepers, you need no special software--just your browser. The folks at Yahoo! claim you can build a store and start taking orders in "minutes."

But please don't underestimate the time and effort required to successfully run a store, even online. If you want try running an online store because you love what it is you'll sell, go for it. If you want to get rich quick, go to Las Vegas instead. Your odds of striking it rich will probably be better there. Before deciding, be sure to read the excellent article "The 10 Secrets of Selling Online" by Paul Graham at store.yahoo.com/vw/secrets.html.

Sidebars for this chapter

See something you want to share with a friend? With Netscape, click on File, then Mail Document. Fill in your friend's email address and add a message, if you like.

If you can't find a store's email address (unfortunately a common occurrence these days), try the following method. If the Web address is www.greatstore.com, then send email to "webmaster@greatstore.com" or "support@greatstore.com". If that doesn't work and the message bounces back as "undeliverable," then look them up at one of the online yellow pages sites, such as AnyWho www.anywho.com, Switchboard www.switchboard.com, or Big Yellow www.bigyellow.com

For links to scheduled chat programs, with experts and celebrities check Yahoo! Net Events events.yahoo.com, On Now www.onnow.com, Yack! www.yack.com, and TalkCity www.talkcity.com. To talk anytime about anything with anyone, go to Excite People and Chat talk.excite.com, ICQ www.icq.com, Yahoo! Chat chat.yahoo.com, Tripod www.tripod.com, or Xoom www.xoom.com [now NBCi www.nbci.com].

If you really get into the mode of relating to other people in chat, go to Xoom (www.xoom.com) [now NBCi www.nbci.com] and start your own free chat room. Tell your online friends about it, and gather there at pre-set times to talk about whatever interests you.

If you love the forum style of discussion, consider creating your own forum for free at Delphi (www.delphi.com).

Ever want to talk to a friend while in the middle of an online shopping excursion? Go to Mirabilis www.mirabilis.com [since bought by AOL] and read how their ICQ "instant messaging" software works. Download and install it. Then get your friends to do the same.

Concerned about the volume of email you might get from distribution lists? Sign up for free email accounts at places like www.hotmail.com, www.yahoo.com, www.altavista.com, and www.excite.com. You can use a different account to subscribe to each list. You can then pick up messages from a particular distribution list by going to the email account that you used when you signed up for that particular list.

Okay. You've become a shopping guru. Why not use the money you've saved to throw a party for the friends you've met online? If you live in far-flung locations, arrange to "rendezvous" at a vacation spot. To work out your travel plans, maybe hold a weekly chat or carry on your discussion in a forum. To get the best travel deals, check the sites discussed in Chapter 8. And when you get back, post pictures and notes at your own Web site.

For more shopping resources, check our Online Shopping Directory www.samizdat.com/shopping.html

For more about online community see www.samizdat.com/commun.html

The rest of the book (Shop Online the Lazy Way):

Part One covers aspects of online shopping that apply no matter what you want to buy.

Chapter One covers the basics -- how to find your way to the online stores you want by way of the paths that others have laid out for you.
Chapter Two provides the information you need to become an independent shopper, using search engines and price-comparison sites, and auctions.
Chapter Three gives you pointers on advanced techniques, which can help you become a creative shopper -- sharing experiences with and getting advice from other shoppers, and becoming a full member of the online community.

Part 2 covers special cases, where there are major differences in how you shop based on the kinds of things you are looking for:

Chapter 4 -- books, music, and videotapes
Chapter 5 -- computers and software
Chapter 6 -- travel
Chapter 7 -- food
Chapter 8 -- money, including loans, insurance, and investments
Chapter 9 -- cars
Chapter 10 -- real estate, including houses, apartments, and roommates

This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com

Please visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat

You may also want to check Richard's Online Shopping Directory www.samizdat.com/shopping.html, which has links to all the sites mentioned in the entire book, plus sites he has learned of since the book went into production.

Return to B&R Samizdat Express
For a thorough discussion of this topic, buy Richard's book Web Business Bootcamp (published by Wiley) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471164194/brsamizdatexpres

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