Many shoppers still prefer browsing in person to see what they’re buying firsthand. But you can’t deny the perks of shopping online.
“The ease and convenience. Not having to go into the store,” said shopper Kimberly Carr. “I can still multi-task, get my work done.”
While shopping online is possible 24/7, it may not be the best strategy for your wallet.
When shopping online matters
It turns out that when you click and make a purchase, it affects how much you pay, according to a study by data-gathering company Smartproxy.
“All in all, we tracked more than 3,000 price changes across different retailers,” said Mykolas Juodis, head of marketing at Smartproxy.
Juodis said Smartproxy scraped prices on various products from 40 retailers at four-hour intervals. The study lasted for more than a month.
Here are Smartproxy’s findings:
• Prices tend to be lower from 6 a.m. to noon in the morning.
• The best day to shop in terms of price was Tuesday mornings.
• The most expensive time to shop overall was Friday mornings.
“Start of the week, it's usually slower in terms of sales. Then the retailers tend to drop the prices,” Juodis explained. “When it's the end of the week, or mostly during the weekend, we see that surge in orders. The retailers tend to raise the price.”
In addition to demand, price fluctuations are also influenced by competition. " Retailers constantly monitor and try to match, or react according to their strategy, about the competitors' prices,” Juodis said.
Lastly, he said frequent visits to a product page or category signal buying interest and can also influence price.
Whether a retailer responds with price increases or decreases varies by company.
Watch what we found as we compared days to buy a dozen items:
Our findings and how they compare
We conducted a price test for two weeks using a much smaller sample size of 12 products from four retailers.
Why two weeks?
Juodis said tracking prices for one to two weeks can provide “plentiful insights.” Sure enough, we found several trends that could help consumers save money.
After two weeks of tracking prices, we found prices went up most often on Mondays, with five price increases.
For example, the Razer BlackShark V2 X Wired Gaming Headset sold at Best Buy went from $36.99 on a Sunday evening to $49.99 the following Monday morning. By Wednesday, the price was back to $36.99.
Our following finding is that we should wait until Thursday to buy clothing.
In our pricing experiment, we tracked two clothing items: an All In Motion Women's Soft Stretch Hooded Sweatshirt from Target and Nike Men's Air Max 270 Shoes sold at DICK's Sporting Goods. Both fashion items dropped in price on a Thursday morning.
Next, we found that some prices were consistently consistent with no price change.
Five of the dozen products we tracked never changed in price over the two weeks, including a light gray Amazon Basics 4-Piece Bed Sheet Set that sold for $35.99.
Even when prices weren’t reduced, we found some retailers offered other savings. Amazon was one retailer that offered coupons on certain products.
At Target, a 12-count Bounty Select-A-Size Paper Towels sold for $33.49 was frequently eligible for deals or coupons with a Target Circle membership.
Other ways to find savings online
Manually tracking a product’s price for several weeks is not always feasible, but there are other savings strategies to try.
If you can’t price track on your own (or don’t have time to), experts recommend using a price tracking tool.
“Using a price tracker like CamelCamelCamel can help you see the historical pricing of that item over the past year,” said Stephanie Carls, a retail insights expert with RetailMeNot, “Certain items can follow those predictable pricing cycles.”
She said for some categories, better savings come at specific points in the year.
“Electronics tend to see the best deals during major holiday sales like Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Clothing is then typically discounted at the end of each season,” Carls said. “So instead of focusing solely on a specific day, shoppers should pay attention to those seasonal trends and then plan their purchases around that.”
Carls said shopping on Wednesday is often a smart move for groceries because that’s when stores release new weekly ads and restock sale items.
Another tip: shop online using incognito mode, which can prevent retailers from using your history to inflate prices.
“Using incognito mode on your websites to kind of ‘delete the cookies’...show that you're a completely new person,” Juodis said.
So don’t get caught paying more than other online shoppers; that way, you don't waste your money.
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