I thought it would be interesting to just take one item and see what it sells for at several of the usual dealers so I picked Tank007 TK-701 (something I have been considering).
At DX it is $8.80
On ebay the cheapest "buy it now" price I could find was $9.99 (with a delivery date listed at about one month)
At Manafont it is $11.90
At Dinodirect it is $12.69 (for the next 6 days 3 hours 3 minutes and 15 seconds anyway)
We should probably do like the government does for its "basket of goods" economic indicator. We should come up with a representative list of the most common lights and see how each dealer does price-wise considering the entire group of representative lights.
I'm guessing the order would be pretty much what I've listed above however.
If a dealer wants to get much business from the members of BLF they should expect to beat those numbers by 10%.
Therefore the BLS price for Tank007 TK-701 would be $7.92 :)
Maybe we should have a list of all common lights with a price 10% below DX and let all the dealers who love to hang around BLS know those are the prices we will pay.
That replaces the occasion good deal for the consistent good deal. Everything else is just (more or less) sleight of hand keeping your eye off the ball so to speak.
Anyway, it's interesting to compare the actual numbers from time to time.
HAHA... When I started reading that I was already thinking you're being a smarta** and was gonna say something like "we should probably do like the government does... and disregard the competitively priced listings." :P
I decided to stay completely "budget" on this one and ordered from DX even though Manafont would normally be my choice. I don't need this light all that badly or quickly so I went with the bottom line...DX is 25% cheaper than Manafont and DD was even more expensive than that and therefore there was no reason to go there.
If DX speeds up their shipping all of the other companies will disappear I'm afraid. They have their short window of opportunity to gain market share by distinguishing themselves while DX is losing some business due to being slow but they (DX) have more products than anyone and their prices are much lower than most of the rest with no gimmicks necessary to get those prices.
For instance, my $5 sign up coupon with DD never worked but if it had it still required a purchase greater than $20 to use it. Had they not put that limitation on it and had I ordered the Tank007 from them the normal DX prices would have still been almost as low! The normal DX price is $4 lower than the normal DD price and that's on a $13 (DD) item. Manafont is $3 higher as well.