Back to school: Best price for a laptop?

London, September 16th, 2019. Uniforms, Books, School materials, etc. Going back to school generally implies an important monetary outlay for families. Finding the best price for each product helps reduce the impact on the home economy. IT equipment is generally one of the most expensive items. Minderest has used their Price Monitoring technology to study, at the start of the school year, and compare prices for Laptops and Tablets in the USA market. This study was made on September 10th, and we analyzed a selection of 350 products, simulating what a consumer would find when looking online in Google Shopping USA for these products. The top sixteen stockists were identified from the comparison, and only items that were simultaneously sold in at least three of the sixteen were selected.

For each of the products analyzed we looked at, and recorded, the lowest price published by any of these online stores. We calculated the percentage difference from this price and prices from each of the other stores. The percentages shown reflect how expensive each retailer is when compared to the average of the lowest prices.  The results were:

1.  Amazon 0.92%

2.  Walmart 1.59%

3.  B&H Photo-Video-Audio 2.57% 

4.  Provantage 3.88%

5.  Best Buy 5.36%

6.  CompSource 5.90%

7.  NextWarehouse.com 5.92% 

8.  Adorama Camera 6.24%  

9.  PCNation 6.36%

10.  Discount bandit 6.40%

11.  Newegg.com 6.57%

12.  NothingButSavings.com 6.79%

13.  ShopBLT.com 7.29%

14.  TigerDirect.com 8.20%

15.  NeutronUSA  9.00%

16.  Antonline 9.79%

Specifically, the biggest savings possible by comparing online sellers would be 11.80%, which is the average difference between the cheapest and most expensive price found for each product.

“This data”, explains Gary Thomson, VP Sales at Minderest, "allows us to visualize the importance of checking prices for the same products on multiple online stores as we can achieve significant savings."

One of the most enlightening individual examples found during our comparative study, was a direct price difference of over 39.5% for the same item sold by both Adorama and Amazon. While the latter had a price of $859.99 for an Asus ZenBook 13.3” this very same Laptop cost $1199.99 in Adorama - a difference of over $300.