engines. But if I really want a bargain, I will troll eBay for lightly used merchandise that suits my needs just fine. Even though sales usually happen between people and not corporations, most trans- actions are reasonably secure when paid through PayPal (www.paypal.com), eBay’s banking auxiliary. Both buyers and sell- ers are rated on eBay by the feedback they receive on every trans- action. While eBay is not completely fraud free, the system usually works remarkably well, if you don’t mind competing in an auction instead of just buying stuff.
SalesHound.com www.saleshound.com
What local brick-and-mortar stores are having a sale? Use SalesHound.com to find deals that you can drive to. Sign up for e-mail alerts when the products you want go on sale at a chain store near you.
Buy.com www.buy.com
Find slightly dated electronics along with books, music, sport- ing goods, and toys for about the lowest price anywhere on the Web. There are lots of selections here to keep a Hunter happy on the first foray.
Outpost.com www.outpost.com
In California, we have a whimsical discount computer chain called Fry’s Electronics. Every brick-and-mortar manifestation of this company has a unique decorative scheme. At my local branch in Burbank, aliens have crashed their spaceship above the entrance to the store. Inside, they hover from the rafters as man- nequin commandos take aim at them from among the merchan- dise. This company’s online presence, Outpost.com, is not so pixilated. Still, it offers some pretty great deals on all kinds of con- sumer electronics and household appliances.
E-Coupons
In the spirit of saving money by shopping on the Web, let’s pick up some online coupons before we start. These coupon listings have the added benefit of suggesting specific online merchants that we may want to visit.
CoolSavings.com www.coolsavings.com
Sign up to print out savings coupons for products sold at brick- and-mortar stores.
AbleShoppers.com www.ableshoppers.com
AbleShoppers scours the Web for things on sale. It also lists elec- tronic coupons usable at online stores. Pick up its RSS feed to keep on top of those bargains.
eCoupons
www.ecoupons.com
Here is a kind of electronic coupon and sale search engine.
Browse categories of merchants, for example, apparel, books, and computers, or zip down the alpha list of stores. This list links to dealers offering either merchandise on sale or electronic discount codes for use at checkout. More than 160 quality sellers are repre- sented here, from Amazon to Nordstrom to Wal-Mart.
SmartSource: Grocery Coupons http://coupons.smartsource.com
The company that brings us weekly coupon savings in our Sunday newspaper and stocks our stores with little red coupon dis- pensing machines now offers online coupons for printing on our computers, via a special downloadable “coupon print manager”
program. This authenticity is important because coupons are a form of money: Retailers cannot honor copied versions because they don’t get their money back from the product makers. Note:
Figure 9.3 Browse online coupons and sales at eCoupons.com.
SmartSource is a marketing company. I wouldn’t be surprised if the
“coupon print manager” also sends some feedback to SmartSource every time a user chooses a coupon. That’s why the service is “free,”
I suppose.
FatWallet
www.fatwallet.com
It’s a coupon site. No, it’s a shopping search engine. Wait! You’re both right. Complete the free registration to link to sales at online merchants or to participate in the feedback “Forums.” Use the
“Compare Prices” page to access cost comparison content pro- vided by PriceGrabber.com. The latest spin? On this site, getting a rebate is reframed as earning “Cash Back.” Only you don’t actually get the money. It stays in your FatWallet account as credit against future purchases.
E-Commerce and Security
When I teach Internet classes at the library and talk about buy- ing things over the Web, my students invariably ask me, “Is it safe?”
As with so many things about the Internet, the answer is complicated.
Generally, yes, it is safe to use a credit card over the Web to buy from well-known companies that use “secure” technology, that is, they encrypt your credit card number and other personal informa- tion as it is transmitted over the Web. Here is a site that explains how merchants can keep their purchasers safe.
Learn the Net: Security
www.learnthenet.com/english/html/07secur.htm
This site explains how credit card transactions over the Web are scrambled so that hackers can’t intercept them. It also lists the signs that buyers are dealing with reputable merchants—and where to complain if they are not.
Great, I feel safer already. Still, we have all read about thefts of credit card data that have occurred recently. These were not card numbers that were stolen as they crossed the Internet. This data were stolen from information brokers, companies whose only business is to store that information securely: ChoicePoint, in Alpharetta, Georgia, and Tucson, Arizona-based CardSystems Solutions. There are other loose links in the system. Recently, the United Parcel Service lost data tapes that it was transporting for Citigroup. The tapes contained personal financial information for nearly four million people.
The CardSystems theft compromised the privacy of some 40 million credit card accounts. Yet there are billions of credit cards issued worldwide. So in order of magnitude, 40 million is actually not that many, considering how many accounts are out there.
Still, should we consumers be concerned? Yes, especially when these companies do not disclose breaches in their security. In California, there is now a law that requires that customers be noti- fied when their data has been stolen. There, at least, people will know when their data has been hacked.
Eugene H. Spafford, executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University, has noted that if security breaches increase, the federal government may have to step in. Still, that may not com- pletely solve the problem of electronic information theft.
In all my Web-based shopping, I feel fortunate never to have suffered credit card theft. On the other hand, as I tell my classes, one Thursday, I returned a $2.97 terra cotta pot to Home Depot. On Saturday, I received a call at home asking me if I was trying to use my card at a Texaco station. Apparently, a clerk had passed on my number to a credit card fraud ring, which got busy right away try- ing to use it.
And that had nothing to do with the Internet.