Introduction

For Black Friday and Cyber Monday (which I'll abbreviate BFCM from now on), lots of American sellers are offering significant discounts. To take advantage of the sales, every BFCM, I try to get one nice thing for myself. The past few years, I've gotten one nice piece of audio equipment. I'll discuss the topic of audio in a later post; for this post I wanted to briefly describe 3 practical strategies for BFCM shopping.

Pare down

The product category you initially considered probably has too many products for you to examine in detail. In my example, I could probably spend my entire life just looking at audio equipment.

A useful definition of product category stems from user need; products that fulfill the same user need constitute a product category. Therefore, you can reflect on your own user need to pare down the relevant product category.

I already have good speakers, a good integrated amp for speakers, and good noise-canceling headphones. Therefore, I can pare down the audio equipment category to exclude those. More precisely, I am looking for a headphones amp with good sound quality and portability.

Satisfice

As I talked about in a previous post, “satisficing” involves looking for the first acceptable solution. For BFCM, this could involve:

  1. Pulling up a list of headphones amps on sale for BFCM
  2. Picking the first one that looks good

By framing the satisficing strategy this way, I hope to impress that satisficing boasts simplicity, minimizing cognitive load and time spent, while likely sacrificing better solutions. I care enough about audio equipment that satisficing does not satisfy me, though it may serve you well.

Cross-curate

The strategy I use involves:

  1. Pulling up general lists of best headphones amps
  2. Keeping only the lists which seem credible to me
  3. Prioritizing headphones amps based on their opinion across lists
  4. Attaching the best price (accounting for BFCM sales) to each headphones amp
  5. Mulling over the list of amps and prices
  6. Mulling over the list again
  7. Pulling the trigger and buying one

As opposed to the satisficing strategy above, this will likely give me a better solution at the cost of cognitive load and time spent. I can really only do this for a few products without exhausting myself, so I reserve this strategy for product categories most important to me.

Conclusion

Of course, these don't represent the only strategies you could use to search product spaces. You could make a hybrid of these strategies (e.g. pick the first product which also appears in a top list), satisfice or curate in a different way (e.g. ask an expert friend for a single recommendation), or even go wild with randomization. Shopping represents one of the most common and most practical versions of the problem of selection, and I encourage you to introspect on your own shopping strategies.