shopping – Marilynn Dawson's Musings

December 13, 2017 Marilynn Dawson Rants

Minor Rant: What Happened to Effort and Commitment?!

For some reason, as we get closer to the Christmas season with only 2 weeks left before Christmas Day, the collective need for more cash is cropping up around the ‘net. People want cash for Christmas shopping. People want cash to pay down credit card debt racked up because of Christmas shopping. But something very strange is showing up along with this. . . People want the cash, but they don’t want the effort required to obtain the cash, and don’t seem to have the commitment required to get it either. This seriously has me scratching my head!

Around this household, what you can’t pay for with cash, you pay for with effort. My health is not the greatest, so sometimes the effort needed to provide for myself or to earn the cash tires me out quickly. It isn’t fun to head up into the hills to go foraging and then come down to find myself zapped the rest of the day. But that is my reality. This past summer it was made worse by forest fire smoke in the hills. Allergic asthma means trying to filter out as much of that smoke as I can, but on hot Okanagan days, that means breathing in hot air and on a hike, that’s not fun. The long term rewards for my efforts however will last through the winter months and hopefully into the spring when plants start to grow again. We didn’t get as much as we wanted of some plants this year because of a) floods and b) forest fires hampering my breathing, but we got most of what we need for personal hygiene products, medicine, and teas. We broke down 8 large, heavy pumpkins into pumpkin puree to freeze as a winter vegetable, and roasted several tubs of pumpkin seeds which contain an ingredient highly important for managing my condition! My winter nibbles are more than welcome as a result!

In addition to writing about the family foraging lifestyle change, many articles over the course of 2017 related to another venture known as my bitcoin experiment. That experiment now has roughly just over $100 CAD in bitcoin sitting over at Freebitco.in. I can’t spend it just now because miners’ fees have skyrocketed to the point where believe it or not, that amount is just under the fee required to move those funds anywhere! So it sits there earning daily interest instead while I try to add to it. Faucet earnings have tanked with the stratospheric rise of trading value of Bitcoin. But I found another way to earn BTC back in August that I am amazed is having so much trouble getting off the ground!

For people like myself who are computer-savvy, but stamina and energy challenged, this particular venture almost seems like wasting one’s time for an hour while building a potentially-sustainable income! The simplicity of the system blows my mind, but what blows it even more is how difficult some people make it out to be!

For starters, EVERY computer or laptop these days needs antivirus software that’s kept up to date, whether the person is computer-savvy or not. Secondly, most mindful users will now need an anti-porn blocker on whatever browser they have chosen to use on their device. Having Spybot Search and Destroy’s Immunization feature updated on a regular basis further helps block out harmful websites from trying to access one’s machine via advertising. It doesn’t hurt to have Malwarebytes running either. Basically, have your system and your mind protected when you are online. Other tools exist for this task as well, but these are the ones I use.

But when those two things are looked after, the rest of the system seems to boggle people. I’m honestly scratching my head wondering what is so hard about two clicks every 15 seconds for up to an hour every day. So many people want the results of work without the work. When I was younger, it was a joke to tell each other you wanted to find a desk job where you got paid the big bucks to sit around and do nothing. This is almost THAT job! Seriously! You can even do something else while remembering to click that little coloured box and the rectangle “continue” button every 15 seconds. I do that. I have another BTC pay-per-click site up, well, two actually, that I click through while doing my 1hr per day. One of those PTC’s has paid me 3 times already. The second will pay me soon, but took far longer to get there. Having more than one monitor helps with the multitasking because I for one, don’t like sitting around bored. I need to keep my mind busy. To that end I even have a traffic exchange loaded onto my Blackberry Playbook and will click through it’s allotted 50 sites per day as part of my advertising efforts.

These tasks are NOT difficult! What makes them difficult is a combination of mindset, lack of willingness to self-educate and own the tasks at hand, lack of drive or reason to be involved in the first place, lack of commitment, and refusal to work! Clicking every 15 seconds can hardly be classified as work to be honest, but it is something that must be done if that particular system is going to work.

The system in question is InfinityTrafficBoost.

They are a traffic exchange first, and have built a solid earning opportunity for those willing to put in the time and finger-clicking effort. I am looking for four people willing to put in that time every day. Just four. In an age where it seems work causes an allergic reaction, this shouldn’t honestly feel like work. Most people sit and watch ads on TV all the time and never get paid for it. This site pays you! But you have to be willing to put out even just a little work and a little time. One hour per day. Is there anyone out there who thinks they can even do THAT much??? Humour me for 51 days in a row. If after 51 days you don’t want any part of it, you at least completed the experiment.

I’ll keep trying to find these people. When I do, I’ll let everyone know what happened 51 days after that fourth person is found. Just four people doing one hour of clicking every day is all I’m looking for. I had no idea it would be so hard, particularly leading up to Christmas. I thought people would want to finish the season debt-free, but apparently not. At least, not if it even remotely sounds like work.

August 2, 2017November 19, 2019 Marilynn Dawson Budgeting tips, money-saving tips

Comparison Shopping in the Modern World

Comparison Shopping: Discovering the benefits and differences of a product or range of products before making a purchase.

The art of comparison shopping has saved many people money, and it can save you money too! If you’ve never done it before, this is typically how I do it:

1) Know exactly what you’re after. Sometimes figuring out exactly what you’re after is a step all by itself if you were told by a doctor or friend or co-worker or family member that you really should get such and such because you need/want it for some particular reason. In the old days, as recently as the ’80’s and into the ’90’s even, this step was accomplished by walking, biking or driving downtown and checking out the stores that might contain what you thought you were after. Occasionally this step meant stopping a store worker and asking them where to find something, only to be told it was referred to by a different name. Once you knew the exact name of what you were after, you could assess if it was what you were told about, or if you had to keep looking.

These days, figuring out exactly what you’re after can take place online using search engines and search functions of favourite stores or manufacturers’ websites. Sometimes an email or click of the live chat button is still required to figure out exactly what you’re after, but this step in today’s world can be far less time-consuming and far less of a drain on your gas tank.

2) Have a budget in mind. You didn’t expect to come across an article like this on THIS blog without some mention of that all-important financial word, did you? Once you know what you’re looking for, build an understanding of how much this product typically costs and assess whether or not it can fit into your budget right now. If the price is all over the map, ask yourself why? Sometimes the item can come in different sizes, quantities, quality, list more or fewer benefits, come with sales, deals, add-on’s, member-only pricing, etc. Narrow down the criteria you are after, then compare pricing to your budget again. If you only have a certain dollar value you can put toward the purchase, this will narrow the field all by itself. You may have to choose between quantity and price, or quality and price, just as two examples of the decisions you may have to make.

3) If you are shopping solely online, you also have to factor in shipping. Compare the cost of purchasing online versus going to the local offline store to get it yourself. Is there enough of a price difference between in-store and online to warrant paying the additional shipping charges, or is it cheaper to drive down there instead? Depending on what you are shopping for, this answer will vary, particularly when considering outlets where it may be purchased.

An example of this kind of shopping from my own life involves looking at adrenal support. For more than 10 years, I suffered from adrenal fatigue without knowing it, and it finally caught up with me in a bad way in May of 2013. Adrenal health books and advice from the local natural healthfood store led me and family to a range of products to get my healing kicked off to a solid head start. Two of those products were 5-HTP and later when my budget didn’t allow for 5-HTP, swapping to L-Tryptophan supplements instead, and products containing it.

One of the local stores I can drive to in town also has a website where I can buy this online. Out of curiousity, I looked up these products on their website and found the following:

NOW FOODS 5-HTP 60caps 200mg Tyrosine $32.99

NEW ROOTS L-TRYPTOPHAN 220MG 90 VC $14.99

I added them to a shopping cart to check out what the shipping would be like, and learned it would cost $10.00 to have them shipped to me for a total cost of: $57.98

I could drive to the local store, spending roughly $5 of gas round-trip, and save myself roughly $5.

However, what if I didn’t live here where this store is available, and my only option was to get it online? There are so many stores online to choose from! I’d originally been curious if the local store had the NOW version of L-Tryptophan because I’d found it on another online store. Unfortunately, they don’t, so my comparison shopping couldn’t give me an exact comparison. A different store however, did, but not the same quantity.

NOW FOODS L-Tryptophan 500 mg 60vcaps $13.59

Shipping at that location was $9.99 to get this product to my door.

The online store where I found both NOW FOODS items was over at Tripleclicks. How did vendors there compare?

L-TRYPTOPHAN NOW FOODS
L-Tryptophan supports relaxation
Pharmaceutical grade (USP)
Vegetarian formulaL-Tryptophan is an essential amino acid important in human nutrition for the synthesis of melatonin and serotonin, hormones regulating sleep, positive mood and immune function. As an essential amino acid, it is not synthesized by the body and must be obtained from the diet. NOW L-Tryptophan is pharmaceutically pure–every lot is tested to be free of Peak E and microbial contamination. Contains no sugar, salt, yeast, wheat, gluten, soy, milk, egg, shellfish or preservatives.

500 MG, 60 V-CAPS

21 USD

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Shipping on this product costs $10.08 from this vendor.

5-HTP, 200 MG, 60 V-CAPS NOW FOODS
Neurotransmitter Support
Supports Positive Mood
With L-Tyrosine5-HTP, the intermediate metabolite between the amino acid L-tryptophan and serotonin, is extracted from the bean of an African plant (Griffonia simplicifolia) . Contains no sugar, salt, starch, yeast, wheat, gluten, corn, soy, milk, egg, shellfish or preservatives.
200 MG, 60 V-CAPS

24.99 USD

************************************

Shipping on this product was not listed. Normally shipping is listed in the product’s right-hand sidebar if it is being charged to the customer.

So the total cost of ordering both these items from Tripleclicks would be: $68.03. That’s roughly $11 more than getting similar products from the website of a local store. It’s $2 more if I bought one from the local website and the other from another website and paid shipping at both. So for an extra $2 more, if I was living in a small town without a local affordable health food store, I could get both products from one place.

Fortunately for me, I can save myself $15 by driving down to the local store. Comparison shopping needs to take all these details into account, or all it becomes is expensive window shopping. Remember what I’ve said in the past, that a few minutes spent with a calculator can mean the difference between a runaway budget, and having funds to spare at the end of the month. Back when I used to be an affiliate for Tripleclicks, if I chose to add these to a standing order, I’d pay an even cheaper rate than the retail member prices I already shared. Yes, all the stores I did my research at had both member and “regular” prices, offering the guest visitor the better of the two prices assuming they wanted to become a member of course. I also quoted you Canadian totals, because I am Canadian and interested in doing my comparison shopping in my own currency.

4) That’s actually a point worth making because of the international nature of online shopping these days. Always ensure the website you are on is showing you their prices in YOUR country’s currency! Your efforts will be meaningless and quite unhelpful if you don’t at least have a conversion site up helping you make sure you are comparing prices online to what you might buy at your offline store.

5) Member pricing goes a long way when comparison shopping! Take Amazon for example. As a Prime Member, you can eliminate shipping altogether on orders over certain amounts, or ask for shipping to be expedited to within 2 days of your order. This is only available in certain countries of course, but membership has its perks! You could continue today’s illustration by searching for the above two items there and comparing brand, quantity, price etc. just as I did for the three sites linked to here. I am an affiliate of Amazon’s as well, but I’m not too happy with how they are doing things these days, so I’m not as keen to take a piece of their pie at the moment. However, if you wish to use my affiliate link I’ll start you at my course for budgeting: (paid links)

From any of those links, you can continue today’s example, or do your own comparison shopping for something entirely different.

So what are those points again?

1) Know exactly what you’re looking for, and get help narrowing that down if required.
2) Have a budget and stay within it.
3) If comparison shopping online, factor in shipping costs.
4) If comparison shopping online, be sure you are getting prices in your own currency.

Always settle on the location that will give you the best price for the quantity and quality you are after. Sometimes your budget will have you settling on price more than quality or quantity. If you are in that boat, don’t be upset by it, but work within it to make life easier in the long run. If you have the money, settle more for what gives you the best quality for your money. Lastly, remember that membership has its perks. You could save yourself even more money simply by signing up at the site of your choice as a member. Not all online stores work this way, but many do and more are coming onboard with the idea in order to get and retain customers. Use it to your advantage when you find it!

July 4, 2017November 19, 2019 Marilynn Dawson Reviews

More Ways to Earn an Income Online

One way to earn money online, is to work as an affiliate for another company. This is one way Amazon gets word out about their products. It’s become a big way anything anyone wants visible, can get it out via word of mouth. Companies have sprung up to facilitate easier joining and managing of affiliate programs such as JVZoo, Clickbank, and others. These companies don’t merely act as liquidation centres for companies offering affiliate programs, they also offer affiliate ranks and with those, pay structures that reward active affiliates. However, there’s just one small problem with earning funds as an affiliate. If you are not good at sales, chances are it is a dead-end proposition.

In the early days of affiliate programs, people would try to build entire webpages built from nothing but affiliate banners and advertisements in the hopes people would find their pages and click on their banners. The Google search engine discovered 1000’s of these pages being created, and clamped down on what they felt was not very useful content. Suddenly these pages of nothing but ads and banners weren’t getting traffic anymore. The answer? Writing blog posts that contained so many links to affiliate program content that again, Google got upset and changed the rules.

Ever since then, bloggers who wish to create content that sells a product via an affiliate link needs to do two things:
1) They need to ensure that each affiliate link is surrounded by honestly useful information that fits the flow of the article. If the blog article is too “preachy”, it is seen as evangelizing the product and visibility is reduced or wiped out in the search engine.
2) Bloggers need to have a disclaimer stating that some links may go to affiliate content where the blogger will be paid for your visit if you choose to buy. Bloggers that make a living testing or reviewing products are the ones most likely to have such a disclaimer.

For myself, I’ve tried to join various affiliate programs, but have largely failed at all of them up until now. I actually have had the odd sale grant me commissions over at Amazon, a few sales over at JVZoo, but nothing contributing to monthly earning potential. What I have noticed however, is that companies are starting to take an approach that looks incredibly reminiscent to the Multi-level marketing before the Internet really took off. Examples of MLM’s today include DoTerra Oils, Amway, Mary Kay Cosmetics, etc. Generally-speaking, working for one of these companies labels you a consultant and for good reason. You have to study your product and really know it inside out to help your clients get the best use and bang for their buck. If you don’t have any value to add to their lives, you’ve probably joined a pyramid scheme instead. You’ll see these all over the place now with slogans such as “Send just $5 to your upline and encourage your downline to do the same! Imagine, $5 every day in your inbox for life!”

I’ve recently come across a company that calls everyone affiliates, but runs more like an MLM company. This company has been around since the late ’90’s, and therefore has a ton of information to read through and digest before sales even begin! Talk about “learn while you earn”! They have several ways to earn an income, affiliate propagation being one of them thankfully. The other two major methods are via sales from their online department store, and earning a portion of their executive pool, also known as leveraged income.

The online department store could best be called an online bazaar similar to Etsy or another free site I used to be part of where you could buy or use points to get things. In fact, the entire store is populated by goods from literally around the world! E-commerce Associates sell anything from books and USB sticks to organic teas and cosmetics to garden hoses and automotive toolkits! Some sellers offer free shipping, others only ship to certain countries. Canada for example has 87 resident online sellers. Canadian prices aren’t that bad either, considering what other online stores charge around the country. So if you’re looking for a cross between Amazon and Etsy with a dash of backyard garage sale thrown in, you’ll want to check out Tripleclicks.com. The garage sale part comes in where members such as myself can list stuff we want to get rid of and sell it on the site. As a result, Tripleclicks has a banner ad billing itself as the largest garage sale online! You might see this in the sidebar here.

So I’m trying this out now. While I did have to sign up as an affiliate, the process did not cost me anything other than time. The parent company has built their system so that you can do as much as you can for free before putting any money out. This means anyone out there in my financial situation can begin the process of earning money without putting it out first! I don’t know about anyone else, but constantly seeing work-from-home opportunities that require you to put out money first are not only frustrating, but insulting. Frustrating because the money just isn’t there. Insulting because many people out there honestly can’t believe that someone might actually be literally, truly, honest-to-God stone broke or worse, be in debt so bad that money disappears into the hole before they can even buy gas or groceries. Therefore, coming across an opportunity that I can begin working when funds are short, is a real God-send.

Life has gotten financially tighter since moving last November. Prior to that move, funds were tight, but somehow workable. In years prior, I had learned enough about how to live on less than a shoestring budget that I’d actually written a course on the subject. I just might figure out how to offer that course on Tripleclicks in coming months. If you read this blog, you’ll read about some of the tips and tricks I’ve picked up along the way, and you’ll also discover last year’s beginnings of our foraging journey. Foraging has helped stretch what comes in even further, at times making sure salads are on the table without the funds required to otherwise buy the ingredients at the store. These lessons are invaluable and I’ll continue to write about them going forward. However, now I will also be writing about my journey getting started with Tripleclicks.com. Don’t worry, I’m not going to attempt talking you into joining as an affiliate under me. I learned a long time ago that I am not a salesman. Instead, I will encourage you from time to time to check out something I found on the site that is a great value, or a great find, or supports a great business, etc.

Already I am finding sellers of Bibles, Christian books, jewelry, even Bible cases and handbags with Scripture verses on them. Considering sellers are already offering well over 1000 books on the site, this will be another great outlet for authors to check out to sell their books around the world. When I was looking at clothing the other night, you can buy clothes from Japan, South Korea, India, Brazil, as well as North America, the UK, etc.

The site encourages members to transfer the shopping they’d normally do downtown, to the Tripleclicks website. We do so little shopping that such a thing might not be as close a reality for us as it might be for others, but we’ll see. The trick is getting into the habit of checking the site before the next shopping trip to see if someone on Tripleclicks is selling that item. If you like visiting markets and bazaars, you’ll enjoy visiting Tripleclicks. International markets and bazaars normally only occur in places like Vancouver, Toronto, NYC, etc. But at Tripleclicks, the international bazaar is right there at a click of the mouse or a tap on the screen.

So the introductory exploration stage has begun. Let’s see where this takes us, eh? (couldn’t resist, I’m Canadian)

EDIT November 2019: I have pulled out of SFI/Tripleclicks as I have been unable to make more than a few bucks here and there. I am not a salesman and my financial situation has not improved.

November 25, 2016April 23, 2017 Marilynn Dawson money-saving tips, Products

Black Friday: When is a Deal a Deal?

On my author blog a few years ago, I shared a few articles on managing home finances where I didn’t merely discuss savings or budgeting, but when to tell a deal from a ruse. Those three articles are as follows:

I shared two examples in Part 3 that had been major learning tools in my children’s lives as they were learning how to manage their own finances as teenagers.

A few years later, I ran across a blatant example this very Black Friday weekend! Not everything touted as a sale, actually truly is a sale! Sometimes stores will merely place things in a sale flyer to get your attention, rather than have any real correlation to the sale featured by that flyer. Other times, sales may offer some reduction in price, but only because prices had risen a month or two prior. Then there is the issue of research! In today’s example, it must be understood that many Canadians actually go south of the border to go shopping on Black Friday weekend. To prevent this loss of customers, Canadian stores have begun offering their own Black Friday deals, door crashers, etc.

Staples is one such store to try keeping Canadian shoppers in Canada! Unfortunately, Staples did not check all potential competing sources for prices before putting their flyer together, because I made the following discovery:

Their photo products mousepad, ornament, blanket, and puzzle at supposedly “sale” prices, are equal to or just a dollar or two less than the same items in my Cafepress store! Check out these images:

The image to the left is the local Staples flyer for Black Friday weekend. The image to the right is my comparison drawn between Staples and my store at Cafepress. This image is taken from a clickable PDF where you can visit the following links:

Mousepads $1 USD more than Black Friday pricing

Ornaments $3+ USD cheaper than Black Friday pricing

Quail Throw blanket $2+ USD more than Black Friday pricing

Quail puzzle similar price USD to Black Friday pricing

The lack of research really shows up when you also consider Cafepress regularly has their own coupon codes across their entire site. The current site-wide offer: Black Friday Deals! 25% Off* Your Order! Use Code: BLKFRI25 So this makes the above price comparison even more of a goof on Staple’s part! Canadians can still shop south of the border without ever leaving the comfort of their living rooms!

You’ll hear with various sources that its important to compare apples to apples. Therefore, I will point out that these prices at these two sites, are using the same feature: personalized items. At Cafepress, I have uploaded photos I have taken around my area and turned them into useful products people buy every day in housewares and office supply stores everywhere. I even have jewelry items personalized for purchase. Staples doesn’t get into the jewelry, but their photo centre is where their offers on this flyer page are coming from. You can visit any Staples store, or their online photo centre and create these items to purchase. You are also able to do that at Cafepress too. Other online sites also exist for this kind of thing with a friend of mine selling her wares on Zazzle, while I’ve seen local businesses use VistaPrint.

As a consumer in a widely-fluctuating economy, even your Christmas shopping should be shrewdly managed! Always do your homework before settling on where you’ll spend your holiday budget. Failure to do so will hoodwink you into believing you got a deal, when in fact the store you shopped at was not really offering a deal at all.