Many times when we buy items we tend to look at just the immediate price tag of a product which lures us to spend money as we think it is such a great deal. Today I took a casual gander on Ebay as there is this electric toothbrush I was potentially interested in and how I thought this would give me an idea on a price comparison if I was to buy it from a store.

When I first did a search I found a listing for the item for about $99 with a $25 shipping rate which didn’t seem too bad considering the item was about $180 normally at retail stores.

I then saw another listing that indicated it was $81.50 and thought that was even better. However, I then looked at the shipping rate and was stunned.

As you can see, the seller was charging a shipping fee of $75.73. Granted the shipping service is different, but that is still a substantial amount. So while it looked better at first, in the end it would be way more.

I knew a person once who said he simply sold these dishes on Ebay at a loss and instead just hiked up the shipping fee which made him a lot of profit in the end. As he mentioned, for some reason people simply just focused on the price of the item itself.

Just like all those hidden charges on specific services, you really have to be aware of what you are really paying in the end.

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I had a fun opportunity to be on a film set recently and a lot of people were participating as either a casual hobby or side engagement to their regular life I guess you can say. Now the people that were there obviously didn’t know anything about each other.

Now what was interesting was that after mingling around with others there was this one group of people that were talking to each other and one person mentioned he needed a photographer. It just happened that one person in the group was a professional photographer. The person then expressed quite loudly in a humorous way on how that’s why you should always be nice to everyone as you never know who you could be talking to.

The funny thing too was that I encountered a similar situation where I was talking to a lady who happened to be a teacher and she was struggling with Internet related matters as she couldn’t figure out what to do. Again, it just so happens that I know a lot about those types of things and she was delighted to go home and put her new found knowledge in action.

It’s kind of too coincidental in some ways too huh? But in general, never pre-judge people and treat others well as that person you are talking to could easily be the help that you are looking for either presently or in the future. Especially from a business perspective, it can’t hurt to have more connections.

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I had to shop for a new backpack the other day as my old one has lasted for almost a decade and a half. I was just browsing around a department store and saw some interesting ones and as always I always debate about the prices as I want to get the best value for the dollar.

Some of them were in the $50 range which I thought was way too much for something that I would simply throw some items in on occasion. A comment was then made on how there was another store that sold backpacks for about $10 which should do the job and another person then automatically disregarded that and mentioned how the quality must be very bad.

The first thing that came to my mind was how price doesn’t necessarily correlate with the quality of a product. From a business point of view, in many cases you are paying for all of the marketing and overhead costs of getting that product in-front of you.

For example, if there was only one apple tree in the area and one guy has to drive twenty miles whereas another person just has to walk one block to do the same business offering the same product then odds are the last guy can sell the same product for less as his overhead is almost nothing.

I did end up just getting the $10 one and it seems fine for my needs.

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I get a lot of spam mail from India outsourcing companies trying to pitch their services to me every once in awhile. Just today, this one had me scratching my head though:

From - Thu Apr 10 15:49:19 2008
X-Account-Key: account8
X-UIDL: UID547-1207867739
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 10000000
X-Mozilla-Keys:
Received: from mailscan03.yourhostingaccount.com ([10.1.15.3] helo=mailscan03.yourhostingaccount.com)
by mailout10.yourhostingaccount.com with esmtp (Exim)
id 1Jk05C-0003G3-4J
Received: from impout03.yourhostingaccount.com ([10.1.55.3] helo=impout03.yourhostingaccount.com)
by mailscan03.yourhostingaccount.com with esmtp (Exim)
id 1Jk05B-0007Pb-DA
Received: from authsmtp06.yourhostingaccount.com ([10.1.18.6])
by impout03.yourhostingaccount.com with NO UCE
id Bsx41Z00807rVmq0000000; Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:57:04 -0400

Subject: Web Design & Web Development with -snip-
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:31:35 +0530
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;

Hi Alan Yu,

Hope this mail will find you in pink of your health.

I am -snip-. We are an IT company having more then 7 years of experience and development center in India. We have a team of 100 (Website Designers and Software Engineers) who are hand picked from the country’s finest technology institutes and we are Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. We have successfully completed more than 75+ projects which included solutions to top rated companies and many more.

We are a Global IT Services company with core expertise in Web-based applications, ERP applications, Mobile and Wireless applications, Rich Media applications, Knowledge Management, CRM applications.

Please Instant Messenger IM’s or provides us with your contact details and convenient time to discuss about the project in detail so that we can provide you with a detailed and immaculate Task Timeline and Cost Estimate from our end.

What in the world does “Hope this mail will find you in pink of your health” mean? Is this some kind of cultural greeting that I am unaware of such as the color pink is suppose to symbolically represent something “good” so to speak? Confusing………..

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Yesterday I bumped into this deal for an all-in-one inkjet printer that was selling for $19.99. I must admit, the impulsiveness due to the very low price was convincing me to take action as I was considering purchasing another inkjet printer. On top of that, there was a free shipping deal going on which made the whole value seem even better.

I actually did start to checkout the item and was prepared to confirm everything until I noticed that the total was over $30 which didn’t seem right even after taxes. Upon looking closer, there was a fee that had the acronym “ADS”.

Upon further reading, it was a program called an “Advanced Disposal Surcharge” that has been implemented to cover costs in disposing electronic products. The levy has been implemented for online orders apparently back in August 1st 2007 yet the funny thing was I bought products from online retailers since then and this was the first time I saw it.

Understandable charge I guess, but looking at how the fee was almost half the price of the actual printer it kind of killed the deal from buying it online. Things like these may make online purchases less attractive.

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