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COME BUY WITH ME
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3. The More the Merrier?

Next, I tried group buying, which works like this: during a timed sale, the price of a given item falls as more people agree to buy it, thus giving every buyer the benefit of a bulk discount. But in my experience, the payoff wasn't great. At Mercata.com I saw one camera I liked, the Nikon 800 CoolPix, which was then halfway into its "PowerBuy" (Mercata's term for its timed sales, which usually last from one to four days). Though the site claimed that group buying had already shaved $23 off the camera's price, it still wasn't a very good deal; Amazon was selling the same camera for $34 less. Another group-buying site, Mobshop.com, was even less impressive. Here, users are presented with a chart that shows exactly how much the price will drop as more people buy. I had my eye on an Epson PhotoPC 800. But the lowest it could go, even if 51 people bought it, was $440. The same camera was available at Amazon for $398. It's no wonder, then, that when this particular sale closed, the number of buyers was zero.

4. The Gavel Falls

I decided to try auctions — starting with merchant auctions, rather than the person-to-person type made famous by eBay. My first stop was Biddersedge.com, which scours more than 100 auction sites for the product you want. Its best feature lets you research past prices, giving you a good idea of the fair-market value for your item. It also provides a chart with dots representing prices in recent months. My charts suggested that some auction shoppers were buying cameras at well below Amazon's prices. I started tracking merchant auctions through Bidder's Edge and found that this was true. A Kodak DC-280 had recently sold for $44 less than Amazon's price and a Nikon CoolPix 800 for $54 less.

5. Everyone's an Auctioneer

Now I was ready to try eBay. After a quick registration, I set up a "My eBay" page to track all the auctions that interested me. Clearly, some people were getting bargains on new cameras, but others were overpaying just a bit. For example, one bidder saved $57 over Amazon's price on a new Olympus D490, but others paid more: one paid $8 extra for a Canon PowerShot S10, another $5 extra for a Kodak DC-280. I suspect that these people paid a few extra bucks just for the right to call themselves "winners." Lesson: you can save money at auctions, but you should research retail and other prices ahead of time and be careful not to let your ego cost you.

6. They'll Come to You

My next shopping method was reverse buying. I would announce to the world what I was looking for, and merchants would come to me with offers. I tried this at a couple of places — Respond.com and Mygeek.com — and gave sellers two weeks to respond. Both sites spewed back about 10 offers from a motley crew of electronics and camera stores that I never would have approached otherwise. I could practically hear the obnoxious, hard-sell commercials that these stores probably air on local TV. At best, they offered cameras at around the same price as Amazon — which made them losers because I'd rather order from a trusted name (wouldn't you?). Perhaps reverse buying is a good way to shop for obscure items, but for widely available electronics, it seemed like a waste of time.

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