Marks & Spencers are doing a one day Christmas Spectacular tomorrow. this includes all womenswear, menswear, lingerie, kidswear, beauty, furniture, homeware, Christmas shop, wine and champagne. 

Stores open from 8 am until late or online until midnight.

Just a fornight ago, Marks & Spencers did a similar event that sparked a shopping frenzy and other department stores started to cut down their prices to attract christmas shoppers. Debenhams and John Lewis matched these cuts. 

Debenhams have offered a three day sale starting today. Littlewoods has offered 60% for 5,000 lines and 3 for 2 for toys until 23 December. 

To attract more shoppers, stores have also rushed to add the VAT discount. 

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From my last post about the Home Discount Show, I actually managed to get there today… I actually tried to get there on Friday to meet the other half who was already in Earls Court 2 at the Wedding Show but when I got there, the Home Discount Show had finished for the day.

Anyway, this morning, we headed off rather early, found some parking on the nearby streets and headed in. There were people in the street giving away free entry tickets to the show anyway.

Heading in, the first thing I noticed was that the whole hall wasn’t utilised up.. there were stalls around the outside and furniture in the middle.. I did want to buy a coffee table so if there was a good one, I would have got one.

The first thing I bought were some heat pads… these things were gel filled pads with a little circular disc floating inside. When you pressed the disc, a chemical reaction forms solidifying the gel and creating heat upto 54%.. good if you’re in a cold place and need instant heat to keep warm. The heat pads are reusable and you can ‘charge’ them up again by boiling the bags in hot water until the gel returns to liquid form again to be reused.

I got two large shoulder ones for £40 which included two smaller ones which the lady said she would throw in for free. I’ve just checked to find that I can actually get each shoulder one for £16 and the smaller ones for £6 online.. the total cost online would have been £44 so I only really saved £4.

However, I think I did get a good deal on some bedding.. for £60 I got two sets of each duvet covers + 2 pilows, flat sheet and fitted sheet which were Egyptian cotton.

In all, it was good that it was free. I did feel the bedding was great as I don’t have enough at home and I think I saved a bargain. The rest of the stuff wasn’t so great but I wasn’t there in mind for anything particular (except for a coffee table which I was unable to locate). Still, it’s always best to get there on the final day as people want to get rid of stock.

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Today I found two great sites for grabbing a bargain…

The first one is www.offeroftheday.co.uk which lists a lot of the UK retailers in one place and lists the current bargains that are on offer. I saw some which were over 80% off

The other site is myretailcodes.co.uk which details all the discount voucher codes which you can use online to buy stuff.

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Orange are giving away 1000 free texts when you apply for their free SIM card. All you need to do is to visit the site as below and either fill in the form or call the number as shown:

You need to top up with £10 but still, it’s a fantastic deal if only for the text messages! However, the text messages do expire after 30 days so that’s a lot of texting!!

http://shop.orange.co.uk/shop/simevent/metro2mayfreesim

In addition, you can use your Orange SIM card to get the Orange Wednesdays promotion where you can receive a code to get 2 people for the price of 1 in to watch a film every Wednesday.

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Unfortunately, a true bargain on Ebay is much more difficult to come across than it used to… in fact, it’s not always cheaper to buy on ebay.

Anyway, there are a few things which I do to ensure that I get a better than average chance than getting a great bargain on Ebay.

1. Firstly check on price comparison sites like PriceRunner, Froogle, Kelkoo etc to see how much you can get your item for. Note that it is not always cheaper on Ebay so ensure that you are never bidding more than what you see on the price comparison sites.

2. Then go to Auction Bloopers and type in your search criteria. Auction Bloopers help you find money by finding the misspelled items on Ebay with the idea that the misspellings will be missed by the most buyers.

3. Of the ones you find, see if you can find those auctions which finish in the awkward hours in the morning.. ie 4am, 5am when people are fast asleep… ie less competition for you when you’re bidding. However, for those of you that are reading this and ‘awake’ you’ll be wondering if you’re going to be have to be around to bid..  well, you can if you want to, but what I do is to use Auction Sniper. Auction Sniper allows you to bid on your item right at the very last moment (I usually set it to bid at 5 seconds before the auctions end to not give enough time for others to counter you)… and you can be fast asleep when this happens!

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