This evening I went online to BestBuy.com to pick up a new monitor for my home office PC. My old monitor crapped out a few days ago, and I’ve been meaning to get around to purchasing a new one. I tend to avoid brick and mortar stores for consumer electronic purchases, and BestBuy.com is usually the first website I start with when shopping for consumer electronics. (Apparently, I am like most other online shoppers… I read a recent analyst report that ranked BestBuy.com as the number one in total online consumer electronic sales.)

After using BestBuy.com’s user ratings to sort through and find the best-rated 23-inch monitor, I settled on an Acer H233Hbmid 23 inch Widescreen HD LCD Monitor listed at $209.99.

Thankfully for me, I use a couple of different browser add-ons which provide me with timely shopping related information while I am browsing the web. For this purchase, I followed through a message that came up from PriceGong (http://www.pricegong.com), which I had installed through W3i’s (http://www.W3i.com) Install IQ process a few months back. PriceGong alerted me that CompUSA.com had the exact same monitor for $199.99 with no shipping and handling, and no sales tax.

Later on, I proceeded through the checkout on BestBuy.com just to see what my final total would have been had I purchased this same monitor through BestBuy.com. With $14.99 for shipping and handling, and $16.37 sales tax, my total would have come to $241.35. I saved $41.36 because my installed application, PriceGong, recommended CompUSA.com while shopping at BestBuy.com!

Most tech bloggers talk down about any application that requires an install, such as Windows applications and hybrid applications (like the PriceGong browser add-on). Most tech bloggers are so caught up in the cloud these days that they fail to remember why operating system integration can be so useful. How can the cloud compete with the kind of timely information an installed application can provide?

Rob Weber, VP of Business Development and Co-Founder, W3i, LLC
Rob is an Internet marketing pioneer with over nine, profitable years evolving W3i in the Integrated Interactive Media industry.