Dionne: Dude, what’s wrong. You suffering from buyers remorse or something?
Cher: God, no! Nothing like that.
Name that movie!
Well it’s my all time favorite movie, Clueless, of course!
You certainly won’t be having buyers remorse with prices we list at DealTrunk.com. But some of you may have already experienced the exact opposite. A condition I like to refer to as procrastinators regret.
What is procrastinators regret you ask? Procrastinators regret is when you click on a deal that interests you but you want some time to think about it. Later that night you completely forget about the deal while focusing on little Jimmy’s soccer game, grocery shopping, a co-worker happy hour, or any other number of distractions that fill your busy day. A couple days or weeks pass by and then something reminds you of that great deal you were contemplating! Maybe it’s a commercial on TV, maybe it’s a billboard on your drive to work, but one way or another you end back up on DealTrunk.com to scroll through previously posted deals.
Maybe you are one of the fortunate ones and that great deal is still available and you don’t have to think twice about that procrastinators regret! But more than likely that item is either out of stock or listed at a much higher price.
I know it’s happened to me and so I thought I’d take a more detailed look at some of the recent deals we’ve posted and how the prices compare to when they were first posted. Since different stores are likely to have different tendencies when changing the prices on items, it seemed logical to look at these stats one store at a time.
Let’s start with Best Buy!
If you are wondering about the title of this post… my background is in Mechanical Engineering. Therefore data and charts make me happy 🙂 as they allow us to find trends in how things (in this case, deals) work! If you aren’t as nerdy as me and charts scare you, then feel free to skip ahead to the end where I explain my overall observations from this Best Buy review!
Deals posted on DealTrunk.com will remain posted for 15 days. To find the following data, I started with the DealTrunk home page, used the search engine, and filtered by all Best Buy deals. I looked at every deal posted in the last 15 days and categorized whether the price stayed the same, increased, decreased, or if the item was now listed as out of stock. Here’s what I found from the data I reviewed on November 10th:
It’s hard to draw many conclusions by looking at this table alone, so below is a graph which gives a clearer picture of overall price trending.
The horizontal axis shows the number of days since the deal was originally posted, ranging from the day the deal was posted (left) to the 15th day after it was posted (right). The vertical axis shows a percentage of deals. The green line represents the percentage of deals posted in a day that are still available at Best Buy for the originally posted price on DealTrunk.com. Orange represents the percentage of deals posted that are now listed on the Best Buy website for a price higher than originally posted on DealTrunk.com.
Let’s take a quick look at an example. 4 Best Buy deals were posted on DealTrunk.com today (11/10/14), 100% of them are still listed on the Best Buy website at the price we posted (green line). Conversely, 3 deals were posted from Best Buy 14 days ago and 1 was posted 15 days ago. 0% of these are still available at the originally posted DealTrunk.com price (green line). All of the deals posted 14 and 15 days ago are now listed at a higher price than when they were originally posted (orange line).
While the orange and green lines have some crossover and show some variability, overall the trend is for the green line to decrease over 15 days and the orange line to increase.
So what does this data tell us?
The Good News:
- All recently posted deals from Best Buy held their low prices and were still available in stock for two days.
- Some deals were still available for the price originally posted on DealTrunk.com for a long time (maximum of 13 days). Note that since we haven’t been continuously monitoring the deal we can’t say for certain whether the original deal is still valid or if the item has gone back on sale for the same price.
- Just because an item is no longer available at the originally listed price doesn’t mean you are paying full price! As shown in the first table, many deals are still available at a sale price, but at a higher price than when the deal was originally posted on DealTrunk.com.
The Bad News:
- While some items are still listed at the original price, the likelihood of this happening certainly trends downward the longer it has been since the deal was posted.
- There doesn’t seem to be a strong correlation between when a deal was posted and if it is out of stock. Out of stock items were found that had been posted 3, 4, 7, and 13 days ago. This is bad news because 3 days is pretty quick for an item to be out of stock after a deal is posted.
Additional Thoughts:
- Two items actually slightly decreased in price. These are certainly not the norm though as this only occurred for 2 out of 62 (3%) of the deals posted over 15 days.
- 28” TV was originally posted at $149.99 and is now listed at $139.99
- Walking Dead Season 3 on Blu-ray was posted at $39.99 and is now on sale for $29.99
- It is hard to draw exact conclusions as this is a pretty small data set. I just mean to say that not all deals will still be listed at the DealTrunk.com posted price the next day after they are posted and not all deals will be unavailable on day 15.
Our solution to procrastinators regret? If you see a price that makes you smile, then make your purchase before the item is no longer available at that price! However, if you did already miss that deal, make sure you keep our DealTrunk extension installed in your browser so you’ll be notified the next time a great price is available!