Welcome to Digital Manna Monday.  Here I share links to some of my favorite online happenings from the past week.  They could be news articles, blog posts or cool new services.

Whatever they may be, they’re all digital manna: online gifts of illumination and enlightenment.

1) Gilt

Gilt is an online retailer of high-end clothing. From their website:

Gilt Groupe provides access, by invitation only, to Men’s, Women’s and Children’s coveted fashion and luxury brands at prices up to 70% off retail. Each sale lasts 36 hours and features hand selected styles from a single designer.

Did you catch the part about it being invite-only?  I was lucky enough to be invited in several months ago and here I am sharing invitations with you.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have never (yet) bought anything from Gilt; I can’t justify spending over $100 on a shirt.  But don’t let me stop you from spending copious amounts on clothing!  Take my invitation and have a look around.

2) Alice.com

Alice.com is really cool.  It’s an online seller of “home essentials”, offering free shipping and, if you so desire, scheduled shipments. From their website:

Alice provides you a better way to manage all of your household essentials online. You tell Alice what you buy—choosing from great deals on 1000’s of products—and Alice goes to work. We organize all of your products, find coupons and deals for you, remind you when you might be running low, and help you order just the items you need so you can avoid that trip to the corner drugstore or the big-box store. And all this convenience comes direct to your door with free shipping included.

My wife and I love this service.  You can browse by room, price, or discount.  Shipping is fast (at least it was for us).  Heck, if you can buy books, music, and cars online, why not toilet paper and deodorant too?  After setting up your cart and scheduling shipments, Alice.com will save you trips to the grocery store.  Here’s an invitation to join.

Two Awesome Articles on Price Anchoring

I absolutely love articles about money and psychology.  Personal finance is more about emotions than just numbers. So this week I was really digging two articles that came out about price anchoring.

Briefly, price anchoring is the mental assigning of values we give to products.  Marketers are only too happy to set the anchor for us, and then tell us how much of a “deal” we’re getting.

MSRP (Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price) is an example of setting a price anchor.  After setting the anchor, the retailer then sets the actual price lower, making us think we’re getting a great deal.

3) What to Do When People Just Aren’t Buying Your Product

The first article, from Erica Douglass at erica.biz, talks about price anchoring from the seller’s perspective.  She offers some tips for struggling marketers on how to set the anchor.  Very informative post with good examples.

4) Price Anchoring, Or Why a $499 iPad Seems Inexpensive

The second article, from Mint.com (a financial service I highly recommend), starts with an example of how Steve Jobs used price anchoring to make the iPad launch one of the most successful ever in the consumer electronics industry.

This was one of those articles where I hit myself on the forehead and said, “Dang! I wish I had written that!” It concludes by showing how price anchoring leads us to buy junk we don’t need, and how to combat it.

That’s it for this week.  Have any great links you would like me to share next time?  Shoot me an email at damien[at]bitesizeidea[dot]com

Tags: alice.com, gilt.com, price anchoring

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