For everyone who is busily scanning holiday sale promotions and wondering when is the best time to purchase a new camera, here is one more resource at your disposal. A new website called Decide.com will give recommendations on whether to buy or wait for a better price based on complex price prediction algorithms. The website claims its predictions are correct 77% of the time and its advice saves the customer $54 per product. The current advice for a Canon T3i purchase, for instance, is to BUY with an 83% confidence.
In addition to analyzing price history, the website also predicts when new models of current products will become available (the new Canon 5D Mark II model is predicted to be more than six months away, for instance). This feature should help you avoid that dreaded scenario of purchasing a camera just before a new model is released. All the aforementioned features are available for free with no membership obligations, but if you create a custom account within the website, you will get personalized alerts when prices drop. For iPhone users, the decide.com app is even more powerful. The application includes a bar code scanner so that any so called “sale item” in a store can be analyzed to assess whether it is really a good deal or not.
This website is just one of many tools that consumers are armed with in the new era of smart shopping. As with any shopping decision, common sense and good research are the best tools you can use. But price prediction tools may just give you that extra piece of information to help you finalize your decision. Happy shopping!
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Hi Preston and CameraTechnica! I’m the Director of Marketing at Decide and I just wanted to write say Thank you for writing about Decide and our new iPhone app. I also wanted to let your readers know that we have a mobile site that’s compatible with virtually any smartphone so if you’re like me and don’t have an iPhone you can still search for products while you’re in a retail store to see if the “sale” really is deal or not.
Happy Holiday Shopping,
Christi OIson
Director of Marketing, Decide.com
When will decide.com provide advice whether it’s time to buy or sell stocks? Then we can use our winnings to make purchases also using info from the site. One stop shopping, lol.