Finding the best deal online is actually a fun pursuit at times, but it's certainly not for everyone - and it's always time-consuming. What we wouldn't give for some kind of personal shopper-like experience whereby you can just input a link to an item you want cheaper and have a bespoke offer land in your inbox a day or two later...
Hark! Is that the sound of bespoke offers' latest service, Beat My Price? Why yes it is! Teaming up with a number of large retailers and suppliers, Beat My Price is a free money saving service that aims to get shoppers in the UK money off on things like blockbuster movies, home electronics and - of course - all things PC gaming.
Driven by our hunger for better deals, we challenged Beat My Price for a few PC gaming and hardware items. After all, there's always a reason to buy more RAM, right?
There are the case studies provided by Beat My Price—'We saved Conor from Scotland 22% off a Sony MDR-EX650 In Ear Closed Headphones', 'We saved Andrew from Wales 14% off a Batman: Arkham Knight (PS4)' or 'Ian from Yorkshire and Humberside 13% off a TomTom Start 25 M Sat Nav', but it's so disarmingly simple we decided to put things to the test ourselves.
The process to getting a discount involves just three steps (and a sign-up, obviously):
- Find the product you’re looking for
- Copy the web link and paste it into the Beat My Price website
- Click ‘Beat My Price’ and they’ll get on the case.
It takes roughly 24-48 hours to get your bespoke price back - though it can be much quicker - but when it arrives you could bag a saving of up to 12% straight away* 1. This means we were able to spend those hours productively - instead of trawling through endless dodgy retailers to scrape pence off the price of a Fallout 4 pre-order, we were able to get on with the meaty business of replaying Fallout 3 to get even more excited about its sequel.
So first up, XCOM 2 - sequel to 2012's superb strategy reboot and blessed PC exclusive—we wanted it cheaper than Game's £34.99. Finding the link, entering it into Beat My Price, waiting just under an hour and getting a link in our inbox, offering... well, XCOM 2 for £31.15, a saving of 10.9%, so long as we took the offer within 29 hours*2. That's pretty easy.
But what about classic games? We want another copy of Freedom Force, because there's never too many copies of Irrational's fantastic comic book tactical cult classic. We entered a link selling the game for £10.80 into Beat My Price and—again, within an hour - received an offer for £9.79, saving 9.3%, again expiring the next day. So the classics are covered too.
It's not just games, of course, as Beat My Price can also save you money on computer hardware. As we said previously, you can never have too much RAM, so we entered a link for a couple of 4GB sticks from Kingston's Hyper X Savage line into Beat My Price. A day later a link was in our inbox offering the same two sticks at £38.82, a saving of 11.5% and a damn good deal for the 18 hours it was offered.
You can use Beat My Price to discover discounts on more than just PC games and hardware, of course. The site covers all manner of products from large retailers' websites—toys, books, electronics, TV and films, all that good stuff. And to make things even quicker, you can add the Beat My Price button to your bookmarks bar - just click it when you're on a retailer's site and it will take out the already-miniscule hassle of copy-and-pasting a link. God, it's good to be lazy...
As you can see, we managed to save a few quid on our bespoke deals—and when you add them up over your year-long purchases, it comes to a lot of money saved. Beat My Price aims to save you 12% - who doesn't want to save 12%? And with the bare minimum of effort? Who, only a fool.
Take on the challenge today—use Beat My Price up to five times a day, totally free of charge, and grab the chance to get up to 12% off books, video games, electronics, toys, computing hardware, films or TV shows: Beat My Price website
* 13 out of 4 times we find a better price than the one found by the consumer.
* 2 Personalised discount emailed to you within 48 hours. Limited time period to use discount, usually 12 hours. Shoppers are currently able to make up to five requests a day on Beat My Price.
Beat My Price is owned and operated by Barclaycard, whose conditions apply.
