Unexpected Bargains: The Joy of Online Shopping

While searching for something other than comics (OK, the recent DVD release of 101 Dalmatians for our ever-expanding collection of kid-friendly films), I recently rediscovered the online retailer Tower.com. I'd ordered from them once before (wow, checking my email archives, it turns out it was a little over two years ago) but I never think of them as an option when placing my semi-regular bulk manga orders. But since they had the best price I could find on the DVD, I thought I'd try adding a couple comics to hit the free shipping on orders $25 and over. To my surprise, they had some great deals on a couple books I wanted that were either just released or about to come out:

• Dragon Head 10 - $6.21 (38% off)
• Presents 3 - $9.99 (23% off)

Searching through the site for other upcoming titles I was interested in, I noticed a pattern: It looks like the discounts on Tower.com decrease the longer the books have been out: The best discounts are on pre-orders, at around 30-40% off; next best is for recent releases where the discounts are between 20-30%; and finally for books that have been out for awhile, most of them were only 10% off. However, books that are too far out on the horizon have no discount at all and in fact aren't even available for purchase. Still, within this small window of "just released" to "one to two months out" Tower.com seems to offer some of the best discounts on manga that I've found. Plus, they don't seem to hold items hostage: the 101 Dalmatians DVD shipped today even though the other items in the order are still being processed.

Labels: Bargains, Manga, Shopping

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