The Best Time to Buy a Game Online is...

When is the best time to buy games online, and save the most cash? Turns out, it’s early in the week. Buying on a Monday can, on average, save five percent against buying at the weekend.

These are the findings of a survey by online pricing and coupons outfit Extrabux. CEO Jeff Nobbs told IGN that the company had monitored hundreds of games, consoles and peripherals sold online, and concluded that it’s way smarter to shop online early in the week.

The reason? People tend to do their online shopping at work. Nobbs explains, “A lot of consumers do their window-shopping on the weekends, but then they wait until Monday morning when they're back at work in front of their big monitor to actually complete the purchase. Online retailers are aware of this, and so they make their prices as low as possible early in the week”.

The average price for video game-related products hits $70.19 on a Friday. But on a Monday, it’s down to $67.17, according to the research.

Nobbs adds, “If the retailer has a great deal on a video game, that creates a lot of buzz on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday when there's the most shoppers out there willing to purchase a product. If they make their prices really low on a Friday, it's counterproductive, because not nearly as many shoppers are out there looking for video games on a Friday or over the weekend.”

Even though many people have perfectly fast Internet connections at home, shopping from work is still more popular. Nobbs says, “They don’t want to do it on their own free time. It's on their employers' time. Most employers don't have insight into whether or not their workers shop online at work. It’s like social media. Research shows that the best time to post something on Facebook is around 11AM in the middle of the week, because that's when most people are at work, bored, in front of their computers. And so they share all these pictures and viral videos.”

Although shopping online is best early in the week, traditional retail shopping is still best done on the weekends. Nobbs says, “In the real world, when you're at work, you can't also be at Best Buy. They focus on having their big sales over the weekend, because that's when people can actually go to the store and shop.”

“

If the retailer has a great deal on a video game, that creates a lot of buzz early in the week.

Prices for games creep up during the week and hit a high on Fridays. They then begin to drop over the weekend because, when employees in charge of monitoring prices are off work, computer algorithms take over most pricing decisions. They compete with each other and prices drop. However, fail-safes are locked in. Nobbs says, “Back in maybe 2004 you might have seen some very low prices as bugs and glitches took over and drove the prices down. But that’s all been figured out by retailers now, and they set minimums and maximums.”

Extrabux also tracked pricing for home computers, TV sets and cameras and found similar trends.

Of course, shopping habits are changing fast. A third of gamers now say they prefer to buy content digitally. Online retailers like Steam have their own algorithms and offers based on buying-patterns that are different from those associated with packaged goods, bought online or in real stores.

Do you have any tricks for bargain-hunting games? Share them with us in the comments belo.

Colin Campbell writes features for IGN. You can join him on Twitter and at IGN for chats about games.

Source : ign[dot]com