The Juggle Zone: Bargain Blog

My in-laws decided they wanted a digicam, too, so they started shopping around. They finally settled on the Olympus Camedia C-750 Ultra Zoom. It's a nice camera, but has very expensive memory (xD). They asked me to see what kind of deal I could come up with, so after doing a little research, I decided I could buy it at BuyDig for $448, then use my Chase card to LPG it to Infinity Cameras, where the camera is priced at $359.99. My father-in-law wondered why we weren't just buying directly from Infinity. My response: bad ratings.

I had initially planned to buy from ElectricSams, but they would only ship to the billing address, which isn't convenient for me. The two websites are eerily similar, but that may just be due to having been designed by the same folks.

The rationale for choosing these stores in the first place is this. They both charge no tax (here) and have free shipping. With LPG, neither is taken into consideration, so if you paid tax, you don't get any refund for it, and if you paid shipping, you don't get any refund for it either. So it's actually better to pay MORE for the camera in order to get free shipping and no tax, than to pay less for the camera buy be charged for shipping/tax.

I could have made the deal a bit better by spending even more to buy through a FatCash store, such as Computers4SURE ($529, 3.3% FC = $17.46) or Dell Home ($599, 3% FC = $17.97). However, there has been ever increasing difficulty in successfully LPGing, so I figured it'd be better to play things safe, and go the cheaper route.