MoT's WDF

Many of us have been mystified by the ninja-like deal finding abilities of our [mention]TheJohnP[/mention]. Thankfully, John shared the “secret” to his deal-finding success at the recent MoT Social Distancing Summit. It is so simple, yet very effective. His approach has also worked for me when hunting down deals for the “Help me find a deal” thread, so I thought it would be good to share it here. So what is the secret?

Reference number searches.

That’s right, John searches the usual sites in the OP above and when he finds a deal, he grabs the reference number and pops over to a search engine to search on it and see where it leads. This lets him confirm that he indeed has the best deal, and let’s him find other places the specific model is sold...sometimes finding a better deal, or introducing him to a previously unknown retailer to search the next time. In this way John builds his deal searchpertise.

In my experience, searching by name often yields limited results, or in the case of popular brands and models returns an ocean of SEO-optimized results. Reference numbers are still indexed by spiders, but seem to cut through to more of a pure and flat list. Doing this will help to locate some of the more obscure or unknown retailers, and you might find they have a better deal going.

As the local stat collector, my biggest pet peeve is retailers who don't include the reference/model number in the listing. It at least triples the amount of time it takes me to enter the data.

Not only is it bad practice, but they are self-limiting potential sales. Plugging a reference number into a search engine will never lead the prospective customer to their site.

ManOnTime wrote: ↑Tue May 12, 2020 9:55 am As the local stat collector, my biggest pet peeve is retailers who don't include the reference/model number in the listing. It at least triples the amount of time it takes me to enter the data.

Not only is it bad practice, but they are self-limiting potential sales. Plugging a reference number into a search engine will never lead the prospective customer to their site.

The reference/model # search does have some of a blindspot with some retailers that don't use them (Saks, Neiman, Nordstrom, etc). So they could have a better price, but unless you check them specifically no way to know.

And if I do find a good price at a place that doesn't use reference numbers, I have to "reverse engineer" it via image search to confirm best pricing.

Not as fun.

I really like the term searchpertise you used [mention]watchpalooza[/mention]. I'll have to incorporate that going forward.

Another searchpertise trick is a more general search, especially around holidays.

Do a search for "Memorial Day watch sale" or "Memorial Day watch clearance" and quotation marks are helpful if used.

You'll get somewhere around 10 - 15 pages of results. Go through all the pages. There's a chance you could find a couple of results that prove promising. And if it's a complete bust, it happens. But when you do find a deal or two, it's quite exciting.

I notice dead links from time to time. Duty Free Island Shop is dead, for example. I saw 3-4 just now. List them here?

Robotaz wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 5:24 pm I notice dead links from time to time. Duty Free Island Shop is dead, for example. I saw 3-4 just now. List them here?

That would be helpful thanks.

Robotaz wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 5:24 pm I notice dead links from time to time. Duty Free Island Shop is dead, for example. I saw 3-4 just now. List them here?

With only 13 likes and no comments for 3 years, I had assumed no one was using this. It definitely contains dated information / needs some updating to bring current. I will go through in the next days to validate / add / cleanup and update this resource. Thank you for bringing it to attention.

Alright, I went through and removed the post-COVID dead links. Next step is to mine the deals thread and Discord to find some new sources to add.