This happened about a month ago, but since we are on the cutting edge of the latest news right now, I just now noticed it 🙂

The change affects only those customers who were logging in with a Woot account and were making payments on their purchases using credit cards they had stored in their Woot account. You can no longer pay with those cards. You can only pay using the Amazon Pay option, which is basically your Amazon account.

If you were already logging in with your Amazon account, you were already paying with Amazon Pay, nothing changes.

If you are planning any short-term orders from B&H Photo and also from Adorama, you have to do some planning ahead because the retailers will be closing for the Passover holiday starting on Friday 4/15 and they will return on Monday 4/25. That’s ten days, so if you’re gonna need anything soon, order it now!

If you have any time-sensitive orders for the B&H Photo website, plan ahead because they will be closing for the Purim holiday. More specifically, online orders placed after 4:30pm eastern on Wednesday March 16 in 2022, will be shipped on Monday March 21 in 2022…

Not everything Bezos touches turns into gold. Amazon’s Bookstores have failed to gain enough traction/profit and Amazon is closing them down. More specifically this includes the “Amazon Books”, “4 Stars” and “Pop Up” stores.

The aforelinked page has FAQs on how to deal with returns. The exact closing date is not disclosed as of the time of writing.

The other Amazon physical stores (Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh, Amazon Go) continue operating as before.

If you have any time-sensitive orders from B&H Photo, make sure you place your orders now!

B&H will be closing for the annual Passover Holiday from March 26 until April 4. Online orders will also be unavailable during some of those days.

Of online ordering interest, orders placed before 12pm ET on March 25 will be processed before the holiday closing. Orders placed after that, will get processed when they re-open on Monday April 5 in 2021.

But as usual, please don’t wait until 11:59am ET on March 25 to place your order as unpredictable things may delay the processing of the order (weather, traffic jams, technical difficulties, power outages, etc)…

We have more breaking shopping news, this time the subject is Best Buy, but the good news is that they are not having same fate as Fry’s Electronics as we previously mentioned. Speaking of Fry’s, if you now go to the Fry’s website you will read their “after nearly 36 years in business…” letter, with guidance on what to do if you have anything pending with them (repairs, consignments, credit balances, etc)… The benefit of them having had their service contracts and credit cards ran by other companies comes in handy now that Fry’s is going away…

So to Best Buy now. The company has announced it is laying off 5000 (five thousand) employees and will close more stores than previously anticipated. COVID and overall trends and all, their online sales are now 40% of their total ~ this number doubled since two years ago.

More details and discussion on the Best Buy news via Techmeme…

Considering the Fry’s and Best Buy news, this is a good time to do an inventory of your gift cards (physical or electronic or store credits or rewards balances) at various brick and mortar and online retailers and consider the risk situation of each retailer whose gift card you have. Amazon and Walmart and Starbucks and such may be too big to fail, but others may not be so lucky…

We have a shopping BREAKING NEWS ALERT! [[[ three sirens blasting ]]] All existing Fry’s brick and mortar stores have closed. Tuesday night was the last day they were open. This was leaked to the interwebs by Fry’s employees. An official announcement is expected to come out at some point on Wednesday during the business day [they are a West Coast type of a company]…

The leaker-employee says that the Fry’s website will also go offline. As of the time of writing (Tuesday at 10:27pm pacific time) it is still up…

Details on the various tech and shopping sites, more on these through Duck Duck Go and social media and such. It is already a Top 30 trending topic on Twitter…

According to a Reuters exclusive story, Amazon is planning to delay the 2020 Prime Day, which typically happens in June every year since 2015… [via Techmeme]…

Amazon being so sprawled globally is finding itself in the middle of all sorts of Coronavirus situations, sometimes helping deliver medicine and supplies and sometimes [allegedly] planning to smear its own warehouse worker who dared fight for the workers rights to basic human decency. [via Techmeme]…

In other Amazon action, if you are an Apple i-device user, and if you are a Prime member, you can purchase or rent Amazon Prime videos on your iPhone/iPad and pay using your Amazon payment methods. If you are not a Prime member, then you can pay for them with an Apple/iTunes in-app purchase. You can also start a Prime Video monthly subscription through iTunes. Details of all the combinations and scenarios at the Daring Fireball…

Amazon is prioritizing and reprioritizing deliveries and delivery dates based on the current CoronaVirus situation, with some items deemed lower priority and not high demand getting long shipment estimates even though they are in-stock and you may be a Prime member. The shipping estimate on the product page and in the shopping cart, especially when you are logged on to your Amazon account, should give you an idea what to expect, but of course we are in uncharted territory and things develop all the time, so keep that in mind…

More on this via Techmeme…

If you would like to purchase or pickup something from your local Best Buy stores, starting today they have introduced Curbside Pickup. You have to select this option in the shopping cart (where available/possible). Once you receive an order confirmation with pickup instructions, go to the designated place (with photo-ID and credit-card of payment) and open your car’s trunk for contactless delivery 🙂

As far as at home deliveries and installations, Best Buy employees will not enter your home no matter what. So installations and setups are being cancelled. Deliveries of items (even if heavy and hard to move) will be at your doorstep, not inside the house.

Patience is a virtue until all this is behind us…

… in the meantime, this is a great opportunity to start on all those resolution charts and lens calibration tests you had been postponing 🙂

What you see may depend on your viewport (phone resolution, screen size, etc) and whatever browser and OS experiments they may be doing, so with this caveat out of the way, if you visit the Woot home page with a mobile device (eg smartphone) you may see a different, more user-friendly look. All the daily deals appear in a block together under the “Daily Deals” header ~ you no longer have to go from one sub-Woot to another to check them all out. One touch/click gets them all in front of you…

This is a PSA for Amazon shoppers, especially for fans of Amazon’s own brands. Once upon a time Amazon had zero “house brands”. Then they shyly began with AmazonBasics and now they have dozens and dozens of their product brands that probably not even the people working at Amazon’s marketing can name them from memory.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, when some of the Amazon-branded (eg AmazonBasics) products get discontinued, some “crafty” 3rd-party sellers hijack the listings offering their own products and using existing reviews of the AmazonBasics products as instant credibility for their products.

Details at The Verge and more via Techmememe…

Save the date for potential Woot-OFFs and other sales and giveaways. Woot is turning 15 years old on July 12 in 2019 per their latest email, so stay tuned for promotions around that date… Here’s the teaser from their email:

Sales Tax is a wallet-biter for internet shoppers in the USA these days. B&H Photo has a new option if you want to pay sales-tax without taking the hit in your wallet. And of course very legally doing so.

They have just launched the B&H PayBoo store credit card. You make online or in-store or by-phone purchases and pay the amount plus any appropriate sales tax. At the same time, the credit card rewards your account with the sales-tax amount, so the net balance of your credit card is without the sales tax amount.

For example, let’s say you purchased Hypothetical 50mm f0.005 IS Macro Tilt-Shift for $100. Sales tax in your state is $7. The credit card charges you $107, so you have paid your sales tax. At the same time, the B&H PayBoo store credit card credits $7 to your account. So the balance you have to pay is $100.

You have to apply and get accepted to the credit card (instant decisions available). It is managed by the Synchrony Bank.

NOTE that this benefit is only available to customers who reside in USA states where:
+ there is sales tax
+ B&H is required by law to collect it at purchase
+ there are no state laws prohibiting this practice

NOTE also that if you change the delivery address (eg different state), the credit amount and whether you get the credit may be impacted as different states have different percentages and laws and some-do and some-don’t collect sales tax.

There is no benefit/reward for international purchases. You will not get back customs or other fees. This benefit is only for US state-tax where eligible/possible.

This is a “house” credit card, it can only be used for B&H purchases at B&H, be it online or in-store or by phone or using the B&H apps or by raven.

NOTE also that you must make the FULL payment using this credit card. If it’s a partial payment with any other payment method, you will not receive the benefits.

STRATEGERY
Overall, this sounds like a promising idea, assuming you plan your purchases wisely and check what your purchasing/finance APRs are in case you are planning to make payments over time ~ especially if there are no special 0% financing offers available at the time of purchase.

This however creates complications if you frequently use or receive B&H Gift Card and/or B&H Rewards, so that’s something to consider. Some states may not collect sales-tax on digital downloads/services (eg CreativeCloud, software purchases, cloud subscriptions), so in those cases, you may be able to pay for them using your B&H gift cards.

Or you can re-gift the B&H gift cards or sell/trade them on the gift card market (plenty of sites and options these days for gift cards)…

We previously mentioned the B&H Photo Passover shopping schedule. Now we have the shopping schedule for the Adorama website. It is a bit different, so pay attention to the cut-off dates below:

Orders placed by Friday 4/19/19 at 12:30pm eastern will be processed on the day they are submitted (unless they hit a snag during the verification process or the products are not in-stock and things of that nature). Ideally, don’t wait until 12:29pm ET to place your order 🙂

Orders placed after that will be processed when Adorama returns from the Passover holiday on Monday April 29 in 2019.

Online ordering and phone sales and customer service are available on some of those days. Check their website for the detailed schedule…

This is a heads-up so you can plan ahead your purchases. B&H Photo will be closing for the Passover Holiday on Thursday April 18 at 7pm ET and will re-open on Sunday April 28 at 10am eastern. That’s ten days, so indeed one must needs place an order now if they want to receive it this month!

Online ordering will be available during some of the closing BUT orders placed AFTER 6pm eastern on April 18 will be shipped on/after April 28…

Online ordering is available:
+ Fri April 19 at 7:30pm ET until Sun April 21 at 9pm ET
+ Thu April 25 7:45pm ET until Sat April 27 at 9:15pm ET

So to summarize for the speed-readers, the deadline to place your online orders if you want them to ship this week is Thursday April 18 at 6pm eastern. Best not wait until 5:59:59pm ET though 🙂