Setting Up Deal Radars

published

2011-03-06

The internet is an amazing place to find great deals. In the last few months, I got a $20 Amazon gift certificate, about $20 of Amazon mp3/video downloads, and enough airline miles for 3 round-trip domestic flights - all for free. I also got a really nice bike for $20 that I easily sold for $80 when I had to move. The only problem is finding the deals without wasting tons of time looking for them. In response to this problem, I've set up a system of deal radars to help seek out the best deals with minimal effort.

The system has two components, both based on RSS feeds. The first component is designed to look for specific deals that I want and the second is design to scout for anything interesting.

Specialized radars are usually based on a craigslist search. For example, say you are looking for a new bike, but you're not in a big hurry and you'd rather wait for a good deal. Start by doing a craigslist search restricted to a price lower than you would expect to pay, and perhaps add keywords for the brand and other details. If nothing impressive turns up, scroll to the bottom of the page where a small orange RSS icon appears, and copy that link into an RSS to email service like feedmyinbox.com. If you're not too busy, give your cell phone's email address (all cell phone companies have email to SMS gateways). After setting this up, you'll receive real-time feeds of potential deals on your cell phone, so you'll be the first to know when an exceptional deal shows up and you can snatch it right away.

General-purpose radars are built by collecting RSS feeds of deal websites in Google Reader. Start by searching for deal sites that match your tastes. You can also search for specific deals that you heard about and see which sites listed that deal. Then subscribe to the RSS feeds of all of these sites with Google Reader. This not only makes it quick and easy to scan through deals because it lists all of the headlines in one page, but also provides some very useful information: the list of recommended sites, which is determined based on your current subscriptions. If you periodically check out the recommended sites and subscribe to a couple of them, and then unsubscribe from your worst performers, you're subscriptions will undergo an evolutionary process. After enough generations, you should end up with a list of subscriptions that is well optimized for the type of deals that you like.

Using these radar systems, you should be able to save a decent amount of money for just a couple minutes a day of effort.