Zarb Professor Gives Holiday Shopping Tips
Don’t worry if you missed Black Friday and Cyber Monday, a professor at Zarb School of Business – Hofstra University advises.
The best days for holiday sales are actually Dec. 10-24, according to Dr. Joel R. Evans, the RMI Distinguished Professor of Business at Zarb.
Evans, who also blogs on marketing and retailing, offers some holiday shopping tips in a press release from the school.
While the best sales are yet to come, you may want to go ahead and get your shopping done early if you’ll be ordering a lot of gifts online, according to Evans.
“Shipping companies such as UPS are encouraging retailers (especially online) to set earlier dates to guarantee a Christmas delivery and avoid a late delivery fiasco,” Evans says in the Zarb press release.
If a big-ticket item is on your shopping list, it pays to shop around and monitor pricing trends online, Evans says. “Online retailers have much more dynamic pricing. They are less bound by day and time. They can monitor competitors and their own sales rates, and more quickly adjust prices.”
And when you are ready to purchase that big gift, Evans recommends skipping the extended warranty — even if you’re getting the hard sell to purchase it. “For some retailers, the profit on these warranties can be larger than the profit on the sale of the items themselves,” he says.
If you’d rather shop at brick-and-mortar stores than online, you can still take advantage of technology to get better prices, Evans says. “Some retailers will honor price matches when you scan in-store prices with your phone app and find items selling for less elsewhere.”
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Sarah Beckham
Sarah is a staff writer, covering London-area MBA news for MetroMBA.
