$$: Dec 3 — Bargain Christmas Shopping for The Daughter

Dick’s Sport­ing Goods — $59.49

For some time now, the Daugh­ter has had a pair of boots on her cloth­ing wish-list.  A cou­ple of weeks ago she moved those boots from her out-of-my-own-clothing-budget list over to my what-do-the-kids-want-for-Christmas gift sug­ges­tion list.  

It seemed like a rea­son­able request to me — espe­cially since the only other item on The Daughter’s list is a Jonas Broth­ers [don’t ask] wall calendar.

The Daugh­ter is clear that she does not want a pair of Uggs.  She knows what Uggs cost and sim­ply isn’t com­fort­able hav­ing some­one pay that much for an arti­cle of clothing.

She has tried on quite a few pair of boots in places like DWS, Tar­get, Shoe Car­ni­val, Off Broad­way shoes, Kohls — every­where she’s been in the past two months that has boots in stock.  So far, she hasn’t found a pair that has all of the fea­tures she’s been look­ing for (com­fort, qual­ity, price, color, and size).

So the other day I hit the Infor­ma­tion Super­high­way for a lit­tle boot brows­ing.  By first look­ing for boots of the right style and then read­ing cus­tomer reviews, I nar­rowed my search down to a style offered by EMU Aus­tralia called “Bronte Lo” in chest­nut.  They seemed to be exactly the style The Daugh­ter was seek­ing, were very well rated by review­ers, appeared to be high qual­ity and made from high-quality prod­ucts, and, though slightly on the pricey side, are half the price of Ugg boots.

The next step was to show them to The Daugh­ter.  She agreed that, at least on a com­puter screen, the boots appear to be what she’s look­ing for.  Color on a mon­i­tor is hard to gauge and the chest­nut color appears quite dif­fer­ently on dif­fer­ent sites.

Nat­u­rally, my pref­er­ence would have been to find a local source for EMU boots so The Daugh­ter could see, feel, and wear the boots before buy­ing them.  I have enough expe­ri­ence with buy­ing cloth­ing online for kids to know that any sav­ings real­ized by online bar­gain shop­ping can quickly dis­ap­pear in ship­ping costs.  But the EMU Aus­tralia web­site only listed two local retail­ers with­out a rea­son­able dri­ving dis­tance and nei­ther of those stores ended up car­ry­ing the style we were look­ing for.

So I went back online today and decided to get the best deal I could find.  First I Googled the boots and used the “shop­ping” tab to help nar­row my results.  Unfor­tu­nately, using Google Shop­ping as a means of com­par­i­son shop­ping isn’t as pro­duc­tive as it used to be.

My next step was Amazon.com.  The best price on Ama­zon was the best price over­all on the web — $53.99.  That’s $11.00 bet­ter than the next low­est Ama­zon price and $16.00 less than the aver­age price over­all.  Even bet­ter, we still have a $39. Ama­zon gift cer­tifi­cate bal­ance that I could apply to the total.  At first (and sec­ond, and maybe even third) glance, this low price seemed to clearly be the best option.

But I kept my head and looked deeper into the total cost of the boots before mak­ing the Ama­zon purchase.

First I checked on ship­ping costs.  The low­est price seller charged $9.99 for ship­ping bring­ing the cost to $63.99.  That brought the cheap­est seller within $1.00 of the sec­ond cheap­est seller.  A quick glance at the seller’s return and refund poli­cies was the final strike against them.  If the boots have to be returned, I have to pay ship­ping costs and I’m be issued a mer­chan­dise credit; no cash refunds offered.

So I took a closer look at the sec­ond best price.  Their return and refund pol­icy was slightly bet­ter in that they offered either a credit or a refund but, again, return ship­ping would have come out of my pocket.  Time to look further.

Piper­lime and Zap­pos were the most obvi­ous choices as both are large, have good rep­u­ta­tions, and offer free ship­ping — even for returns.  But I already knew that Piper­lime didn’t have the right size in stock and Zap­pos doesn’t even carry the cov­eted style in adult sizes.  So I went back to Google.

This time through, Dick’s Sport­ing Goods caught my eye.  The price, $69.99, was the same as most the big name stores.  Okay, check the details: Free ship­ping? Check.   Free return ship­ping? Yup. Return for exchange or refund? You betcha’.  Size, color, and style in stock?  Accord­ing to the web­site, yes.

Okay, now we’re get­ting some­where but can we sweeten the deal even more?

Tak­ing a page from Pinyo’s book, the next thing I did was Google for a “Dick’s Sport­ing Goods coupon” and found one for 15% off on CouponAlbum.com.  That took $10.50 off my total.  Next I checked eBates and learned they were offer­ing 3% cash back for Dick’s — by my cal­cu­la­tions that’s another $1.78 saved.  Finally, I charged the pur­chase to my Amer­i­can Express Blue Cash card which, accord­ing to my cur­rent cash back level, will result in an addi­tional 1.5% ($0.89) savings.

My final cost, for boots that I still don’t know whether or not The Daugh­ter will like:  $56.82.

Related posts:

1. Day 41
2. $$: Christ­mas Ship­ping & Shopping
3. Day 121: Clothing
4. Day 31
5. Day 189: Shop­ping Frenzy