2.3. Finding Best deals and latest information by joining a community of shoppers

http://forums.dealofday.com

You should be ready to join the community of Internet online shoppers once you decide that online shopping is something of a culture and you need to participate in it to get help and give help. Once you become part of this special group of people, then you'll begin to realize the true benefits of the Internet. By sharing openly, you gain access to the wisdom, experience, insights, and fellowship of tens of thousands of other online shoppers who have interests similar to yours.

Just tens of thousands of people? Not millions? Only a small percentage of those who shop online actively participate in the online community. Most online shoppers just pass through their shopping experience, buying one thing here and another there. But if you aspire to do more than that and want to achieve the truly active effortlessness that comes when you make online shopping an integral part of your life and identity, you should join a community of shoppers. You'll live it, you'll breathe it, you'll love it.

What do we mean by the online shopping community?

The Internet offers a variety of ways by which you can and should interact with other shoppers, and not just with shopping carts and credit-card transaction processing programs. Here is a brief summary:

• Chat is "real time" dialogue that occurs on the Internet between several people who are online simultaneously in the same chat area. In that chat area, you will be able to see what other participants type and they see what you type--live--as it's happening in real time.
• Forums are like bulletin boards. You post a message. Somebody comes by later and posts a response. Somebody else responds to that response. Over the course of days, weeks, months, years, threads of discussion grow.
• With email distribution lists, you "subscribe" to receive and send email messages in a given subject area. These email distribution lists are sent by and to other online participants who also subscribe.
• With newsgroups (also known as "Usenet newsgroups"), you can post and read messages in a given subject area without having "subscribed," simply by going to the right place within the newsgroup to read.

Using one of more of these mechanisms, you can help and be helped by others like yourself, getting recommendations and giving advice that you will gain from your own Internet experiences. 

What it means to be a "full player"

When you first ventured online, you probably had some misgivings about all these stores run by unknown people. After all, how can you know where these stores are, who the people are who run them, and whether they'll actually produce the goods they promise. But you aren't alone in your online shopping experience out there in Cyberland.

Rather than "buyer beware," it's the vendors who should be wary--regardless of how big or small the store, or how well-known or obscure the company happens to be. You see, the online vendors are at the mercy of active and involved customers, like you, who openly share information about their shopping experiences. If the online vendor messes up, word spreads fast among the online shopping community, and that vendor's business dries up.

Once you know how this online community stuff works, you should also consider becoming a full player:

• By joining a community of online shoppers forums like www.dealofday.com you can publish recipes, tips, or experiences: ideas and advice of all kinds, as well as lists of collectibles for which you are looking. Invite the entire world to take a look at what you are doing. The more number of people you know join forums like www.dealofday.com the better chances are that you will always have the right kind of first hand information from true buyer experiences.

A Word of Caution Before You Dive In

The Internet is about connecting people to people. It also happens to allow you to make purchases and to access enormous quantities of information, but connecting people to people is the heart of the matter.

As you meet new people in newsgroups, forums, and chat sessions, you can benefit from their advice and suggestions, and you can help others as well. Just remember that people are people even in cyberspace: with all their good and bad traits. You should proceed with caution, listening more often than talking, until you've had enough online experience to develop cyber-street- smarts.

You have learned to proceed cautiously when approached by a street hawker or a door-to-door salesperson or when you get an unsolicited phone call from a stranger. You need to get used to the Internet equivalent of these encounters, to sense when you should hold back and when you should be open and sharing.