Christmas Shopping Online

The older my kids get the harder it is to buy Christmas presents for them secretively. We used to be able to throw things in the cart unnoticed but now they notice every tiny thing I put in there! In order to keep the magic of Santa alive it has become increasingly necessary to come up with other methods to get my shopping done.

Two years ago I did all of my Santa Claus shopping online. I always like to get my shopping done early and since we had an impending move at Thanksgiving and I had a husband who moved right after Halloween, it was also my only choice as I knew we would be homeless for the next month.. If you are interested in doing your shopping online here is how I went about it. This method will also work for normal Christmas shopping as well.

First: Make a list of all the items you wish to purchase for each child. If you are on a budget, include that in your list as well.

Second: Decide which stores you will be shopping at and stick to those stores only. If you let yourself get sidetracked by every online store that carries your toy it'll quickly become overwhelming. The stores I used were: Target, Wal-Mart, ToysRUs, KB Toys, Kmart, and Amazon.

Third: Now comes the tedious part! When you can find time, visit each of the sites, find the toys your are looking for, and record their prices. If you are fluent in Excel this could easily be turned into a spread sheet. If you are Excel-illiterate like me then just stick to a Word document.

Fourth: Take notice of which stores offer free shipping or other deals and shop accordingly. Amazon has free shipping on orders over $25 but you have to purchase items directly from them or through a vendor that participates in their shipping policies.

Here's an Example of what your list could look like:

Aftyn:
My Little Pony RC Scootaloo on the Go!
Wal-Mart: $19.97
Toys R Us: $20.99
Amazon: $19.99
KB Toys: $27.99


Fur Real Friends
Wal-Mart: $12.97 (Pig)
Toys R Us: $13.99 (Panda)
Amazon: $13.95 (Honey Bear)
Kmart: $14.99 (Dalmatian)
KB Toys: 14.99 (Dalmatian)

Things I learned:

• Wal-Mart always had the lowest price on toys HOWEVER they rarely had exactly what I was looking for. Kmart was the same way. On a good note Wal-Mart offers free shipping to their stores on many of their items. All you have to do is go and pick up your stuff.
• I figured that ToysRUs would always be the most expensive but I was pleasantly surprised by how close they were to Wal-Mart.
• KB Toys was consistently the most expensive EXCEPT for they had the exact push car I wanted to buy for Gavin for about 15 dollars cheaper than anyone else so you just never know!
• Although Target seemed liked a great place to look for toys it was very disappointing in its selection and I ended up elliminating them from my list.

So which store did I end up buying the majority of my presents from? Amazon. Even though they weren't the cheapest venue they do offer free shipping. After calculating all of the shipping costs into my purchases Amazon was the cheapest route by enough to convince me. Happy shopping!