|
|
|
24 November
Budget Christmas Ideas, Advice and Warnings
Don't Panic! Help Is At Hand.
by
SoftwareGuru
As a place to buy cheap discount software online, the
Software4Students UK website attracts many parents and
students who are looking for value for money.
With the Christmas shopping season now upon us, search engines
like Google and
Bing are seeing a big increase in searches for discount gift
ideas.
How the UK economy responds this Christmas will go a long way to
providing evidence of whether or not consumer confidence is
returning and with it, the prospect of real economic recovery.
Signs from across the Atlantic are encouraging.
In America, the post-Thanksgiving holiday season is one of the
most important times of the year for retailers, beginning with
Black Friday.
Black Friday is a term for the Friday after Thanksgiving in
the United States, which is the beginning of the traditional
Christmas shopping season.
As Thanksgiving falls on the fourth Thursday in November in the
United States, Black Friday occurs between the 23rd and the 29th
of November.
In an interview last week (19.11.09) on CNBC, one Google analyst
confirmed that year-on-year search trends relating to seasonal
online shopping have increased but
whether this will translate into increased sales remains to be
seen.
From a software point of view,
unprecedented demand for Windows 7 and Xbox 360 games such
as
Modern Warfare 2 breaking records (1.78 million sales in
first week of UK release), indicate that consumers are indeed
spending money.
|
|
|
Shopping Clever
Parents with experience of toy shopping at Christmas know only
too well about trying to get hold of the latest, most popular
toy.
The forums over at MoneySavingExpert.com offer excellent
advice from cash conscious parents as to how to get the best
Christmas gifts on a tight budget.
Even the BBC 6 o'clock News runs its annual high street shopping
piece where it namechecks the most wanted toys that will be hard
to find if you don't buy early.
Popularity will always cause stock issues when it comes to a
product with unprecedented demand, an issue
that Software4Students and Microsoft have had to deal with to
the best of our abilities this month in relation to Windows 7
orders.
While it won't be obvious to most customers, the product in
question, Windows 7 Upgrade under Academic Licence is
in fact, relatively speaking, a niche product.
Stock availability must be considered in a world where the head
of Dell states that the future of his corporation rests squarely
on the shoulders of Windows 7 getting to PC retailers in time
for the holiday season.
While the biggest corporations were offering pre-sales to the
general public, academic resellers were waiting
patiently for the opportunity to find out what Windows
7 deals would be on the table for students and family members.
It's important that academic customers understand the reasoning
behind why the software comes so cheap - there's a lot of
education license red tape to get through - so if there's a
shortage of stock for Microsoft's academic resellers we
are in effect waiting alongside our customers.
As I've stated on our
Twitter page, customer trust & confidence is hard to build
up and easy to lose. That's why 98% of all S4S orders are
delivered correctly without delay.
Social networking allows us to ask questions online and find the
best bargains. Already it is having a huge impact on influencing
customer Christmas shopping decisions.
|
Safety Online.
Christmas is a time for many things and unfortunately, one of
them is
telephone sales scams.
No matter what company phones you over the next few weeks, no
matter who they say they're from, do not give them your credit
card details.
For example, a company offering you a "free" mobile
handset upgrade is a common one, where they need your payment details to
cover postage and packaging.
As a general rule, if you made the call that's OK.
If they called you, always tell them you'll call them back.
More often than not, a quick call back to the company's regular
sales phone number
will reveal that it was a scam.
If you're busy around this time of year and in the middle of
doing something when they call, it's easy to get caught out.
The worst part of it all is that people who get scammed once
- by anyone - become incredibly cynical and too-good-to-be-true
offers from the likes of Software4Students then appear
untrustworthy.
As an
Official Microsoft Partner, nothing could be further from
the truth.
Have fun Christmas Shopping for your family and if there's a new
computer or laptop on the horizon, you know where to
find a software bargain - right here!
|
|
Posted by
admin
at
09:48
|
|
Budget Christmas Ideas, Advice and Warnings