Where to find Cyber Monday deals

If you didn't get your fill of shopping on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, you've still got today, Cyber Monday, to hunt for bargains. But don’t tell the boss. Just as Black Friday symbolizes the beginning of the overall holiday shopping season, Cyber Monday is the day many people return to work and start their holiday shopping in earnest on the Internet. And it’s one of the busiest shopping days of the year. Overall, an estimated 61 million people are expected to shop from work during the winter holidays.

To attract customers to Web sites on Cyber Monday, many merchants offer special promotions and sweeten their deals by offering free standard shipping, deferred interest payments, and bonus discounts.

The National Retail Federation, which coined the term Cyber Monday, has established a helpful and well-organized Web site, where you can easily check out the carrots being dangled by nearly 400 well-known retailers specializing in everything from apparel, electronics, and recreational equipment to toys, pet goods, and jewelry. Some of the offers expire on Tuesday; others are good for a lot longer. Also, you may have to enter a special promotion code to get the deal, and not all purchases qualify. So be sure to read the fine print.

Don’t forget to check out the bots

Has there ever been a word more overused than “sale” is this time of year? Promises of double-digit discounts are so common that it can be difficult to tell if you’re really getting a bargain – unless you have something to compare it to. When retailers tout big price reductions you need to remember that those generous discounts are based on the percentage taken off the full list price, not necessarily the price the product ever actually sold for. Paying list price for most goods is like paying sticker price for a car. Few people do so.

So how can you tell if you’re really getting a great deal? Enter the shopping “bot.” Online shopping bots can connect you to dozens of retailers selling the product you seek, sometimes at significantly different prices. Among the better-known bots: BizRate, DealTime, Froogle, MySimon, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and Yahoo Shopping. BizRate and Shopzilla are affiliated, as are Shopping.com and DealTime, and you’ll generally get the same results in each of those pairs. (ConsumerReports.org offers a Shop Online tool in conjunction with Yahoo, but neither it nor Consumers Union, its nonprofit publisher, receives any revenue from merchants or from Yahoo.)

We haven’t formally rated bots, but recently one of our reporters did a little digging, shopping at each for the same digital camera and plasma TV. We found you’ll have a more successful bot experience if you follow these steps:

• Try more than one. Different bots scan different sets of retailers, which sometimes overlap. If you use two or three bots, you’ll find results from dozens of merchants
• Sort by price. Bots often make their money by charging the stores they search a per-click fee, and some put retailers that pay a premium at the top of the results list, whether or not they have the best deals. So check whether the bot lets you sort by price.
• Get the real deal. Shipping and taxes can add substantially to your bill, especially on big-ticket buys. And not all retailers calculate shipping the same way. To compare what you’ll really pay, use bots, such as MySimon and Shopping.com, that calculate both based on your ZIP code and then let you re-sort by total price. Also, check on guarantees. Most bots make no guarantees regarding price, product quality, or even the reputability of the merchants. Once you decide to buy from a listed retailer, the deal is between the two of you.
• Know what you’re buying. Read the listing carefully to see whether you’ll be getting new or refurbished merchandise. If one retailer’s price is inexplicably lower than everybody else’s, it might be a refurb. Also check whether the item carries the full manufacturer’s warranty. Some gray-market electronics, not intended for sale in the U.S., will lack one, and you’ll have to deal with the retailer if something goes wrong.