NOTE – this is a rather CANADA specific entry, but that’s because the retailer in question (NCIX.com) is a Canadian company that offers a service unlike anything I’ve ever seen from another online store. I plan to expand or followup to this article if I find that there are other retailers offering similar services.
PriceCanada is an online price comparison service. They have a similar business model to PriceGrabber, BizRate, NexTag, or any of dozens of other online price comparison tools. The difference that makes them stand out for me is that their pricing is all in Canadian Dollars.
NCIX is a fairly typical online retailer of computers, components, and other high tech electronic gadgets. They have a similar business model to Newegg, Buy.com, Best Buy, or any of dozens of other online retailers. The difference that makes them stand out for me is that they are locate in Canada, they sell using Canadian Dollars, and (most importantly) they have an extremely easy to use price matching service built into their shopping cart system. I recently saved more than 30% on my total order by utilizing this service!
NOTE – NCIX has a USA based store as well (NCIXUS.com); however, at present they don’t allow price matching.
If you are only ordering a single item then you might as well just order it from the lowest price retailer (or from a store that offers free shipping), but if you are buying multiple items then this is definitely a really easy way to get a great price on all of your purchases!
Price matching with NCIX couldn’t be any easier:
- Find the items you want to purchase at PriceCanada and determine the lowest price.
- Ensure that the retailer with the lowest price is actually in Canada and has the item in stock. Save the URL to that product page.
- Find the identical items at NCIX and add them to the shopping cart.
- When you are finished adding items to the cart, scroll down to the bottom of the shopping cart page and click on the big red “Start a Price Match” button.
- For each item in the shopping cart enter the lowest competitor price and the URL to the competitor product page. You can get both of these from PriceCanada.
- Checkout.
That’s it. NCIX will verify the prices for each item you are purchasing and, as long as you did your homework correctly, they will send an email reply when they have confirmed the price match. This process could add a day or two to your order process, especially at busy times of the year like Christmas.
This is easy peasy! I’ve never seen another online retailer that does this. Lots of bricks and mortar stores offer price matching, but it’s usually a whole lot harder and much more time consuming.
If you know of any other online retailers that do it please let me know and I will start to maintain a list…
