So you've managed to avoid the school bully on his monthly shakedown rounds, and decided to spend your hoarded lunch money on some books. You could go to the corner MegaMall and whip out your plastic to pay full retail plus local sales tax. You could do that. But s'pose you don't want to? You're going to try this electronic shopping thing. Where do you start? Do you just go to Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble online and order away? If you said "yes," you may be paying too much. Also, school was probably wasted on you.

For many, shopping is soooo much more fun if it's approached as a competitive event. For example, I'm one of those annoying folks who likes to shop for cars for other people -- with their money of course. I love to see the salesman squirm. It's you against the merchant. They still get some of your money, but you get points for giving them as little of it as possible.

This becomes an exercise in doing your homework, and visiting several sites on the web to see who is offering what, for how much.

Online bookstores

First off, the new bookstores. Most folks know about the Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble web sites, so let's start there. See if they have the books you want, and how much they cost. Also note on the page if there are any current deals for free shipping for orders over X bucks or for more than Z items. (At this writing, Amazon offers free shipping for $49 or more; B∓N for 2 or more items; both require you choose their lowest-cost shipping option to get that deal). There are ways to check on who has what deals; we'll get to those later.

Lately, another up-and-comer has advertised that they'll beat Amazon.com's prices by 10 percent. It's worth checking. Buy.com

There are others, too, but these are the major players. You'll seldom find a better deal among the smaller upstarts (excuse me, startups), but the shopping and coupon bots which we'll cover in a moment will ferret those out.

Note that you need to figure the total price of your order, including coupons, shipping (if you can't get the seller to pick that up) and tax (if you are unfortunate enough to live in a state where the seller has to fork it over). Note for example that " 'Buy.com charges sales tax on orders shipped to California, Indiana, Massachusetts and Tennessee." If that's you, there goes most of your claimed 10-percent-under-Amazon savings.

Note any advertised quantity discounts, shipping deals, etc. on their pages. These are often, but not always, well advertised on the merchant's web page. Typical examples at the time of writing are free shipping for $49 or more (Amazon), or free shipping for 2 or more items (B&N).

Coupons: grinding 'em on price

But if the booksellers don't advertise their deals, ve heff veys of finzing zet out. There are other members of the Open Wallet Resistance, hiding in the woods, scouting, and noting who has what deals. 24/7 Coupons and DealDude are two such.

Sometimes DealDude seems to have gibberish on the coupons page. But 24/7 Coupons covers the same ground, so check both.

As a practical example, during a recent episode of binge book buying, I found "coupons" through DealDude for both Amazon and B&N, which saved $5 on an order of $40 or more order from Amazon, and $10 for $50 or more from B&N. The B&N discount was in addition to my "Barnes & Noble Readers' Advantage" discount (5% off online purchases, 10% off brick-and-mortar; if interested in joining, see the link on the B&N home page). With free shipping and no sales tax, I got these two orders for way under what any brick - and - mortar store (even B&N's own stores) can offer, short of the remainder table. The coupon codes are entered during the online "checkout" process. You can try various codes, for various sellers, to see if they work, before actually committing to an order.

Another key point: no one bookseller has a monopoly on lowest prices, so it pays to shop and see what combination of books, coupons, shipping discounts and dealers will save you the most. For example, a $50 book on Rocky & Bullwinkle goes for full retail on Amazon, but a bit over $6 on B&N with Readers' Advantage and coupon discount; even without those, it's still under $7. For a recent B&N order, adding that $6 item put it over the $50 limit for a coupon, and more than paid for itself.

Let your 'bot do the shopping

There are Internet services known as "shopping bots" which will search online offerings for the lowest prices. These are OK as far as they go, but to get the special deals, you'll still have to do your own legwork on the coupon sites. These bots won't find special discount coupons, free shipping, or the like.

Used bookstores

What about used books? There's always Ebay, Ebay search engine , you can try "search in category 'books' " and enter a title, or go to completed search and see if your title went for a bargain price. However, I have yet to see a book go for less on Ebay than it would in any number of used bookstores. It's the auction feeding frenzy effect.

Amazon.com offers to search used bookstores for you, but you can almost always do better yourself. The best used-bookstore engine I've found is ABE Books. If you're multilingual, note the search engines for French and German bookstores on the home page. I like ABE Books' advanced search engine.

That's it. You know your mission. Now, go out there -- and shop to win.

Pete Albrecht, June 27, 2002

Updated March 9, 2006 -- added link for Campusi and Allbookstores, deleted DealPilot

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