cheap electronics

I was looking through radioshack today and saw a buddy of mine working there. I asked him if he had a digital camera I was looking for and he was like yea man but dont shop here

haha obviously only working for the paycheck

anyways he said take a look at tigerdirect.com, I did and they've got some good stuff for cheap and I figured i might as well tell you guys


ps. there should be a 'where to get cheap stuff' thread haha, can you tell I'm a broke college kid?

You may also want to compare prices vs newegg. I've never looked at tigerdirect, so I don't know which is cheaper. Thanks for the link though, I'll have to look into it.

or just use a shopping engine and check ratings.

Oh God this thread will turn into a spam nightmare ... watch how many new registrants we will have after this thread gets indexed. Will be an interesting experiment.

oh man, sorry MJ

I personally like to use pricegrabber.com and slickdeals.net.

I have a rule of thumb for tech stuff: Better pay the higher price and get the better quality than paying less and getting crap. I was involved in the home electronics importing business just a few years ago so I know.

We imported cheap skate mp3 players and many bought it (the trend back then), but I wouldn't bet my money on that they where functional for any long period of time. But hey, you get what you pay for. If you value low prices more than good quality then I guess you recieved your value. In the electronics trade I guess all of us know that you can get low prices and good quality, but you seldom get them from small companies with small budgets (because they don't have the scaling possibility to make it happen. In the home electronics trade this is the reality: you need a lot of money so that you can order a lot so as to lower the per unit cost. So as to make more profit and still be able to sell cheaper than your competitor, and with good quality. A small company just doesn't have the financial capability to negotiate such good agreements with the manufacturers and hence they cannot possibly sell their stuff that cheap without losing money. Sane businessmen does not want to lose money for every order they deliver. They want to break even some where).

The sad part for those customers that me and my partner in Stockholm sold too was that we only imported and traded them. There was no real customer service to talk to if the mp3 players failed to function and there was no real infrastructure either for handling returned orders. We just sold them on Blocket.se which is a swedish counterpart to something like Craigslist.

Just the other day I heard about a company, swedish, who made something like 10 Million SEK (equivalent of USD$1 Million) scamming people buying home electronics for cheap skate prices. They took the money and ran away. So cheap prices is not always a blessing and I might add that if you are going to go for cheap prices, investigate well before the actual purchase. And go with the giants, because they are more likely to be able to deliver good quality for a low price. Because they obviously have the financial capability to make it happen.

I usually don't recommend the big corporations (I am like Richard Branson, trying to make small companies stand out as better in many regards), but in this regard you should use the bigger corporations. Because when it comes to low prices and good quality it all comes down to how much you, as a company, can buy every unit for (as low as possible) and how much you can sell it for so as to attract customers.

When it comes to selling "rare to find" electronics, then quantity is no longer a real factor and hence the company selling it can charge more and they can buy less examples at a higher price and still make a profit. Another world that is. In that case, small companies is better than big corporations.

A long rant. Hope I didn't waste your time. I just found it interesting to write about it because of my own experience (or stint I might say) in the importing trade.

I like Canon digital camra's, I bought the last one from Amazon.