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Five Ways to Improve Your Costco Shopping
Buying at a Costco warehouse club store is a great way to economize.
You can save time and money by stocking up on products at great prices.
But if you're going to purchase at wholesale like a business,
why not use expert purchasing methods like businesses do?
The MakeLifeEasy web application is a tool you can use
to simplify your shopping trips and get the most out of wholesale shopping.
Shopping at warehouse stores can also be a frustrating experience:
disorder, confusion, heavy lifting, long lines.
It goes a lot better if you have a plan and you don't make mistakes.
How do you keep track of what you need before you enter the store?
How can you make sure that you don't forget something you need when you do visit?
(You don't want to go back too often, right?)
How do you make sure you don't overstock something you just bought?
Here are some questions you may encounter when stocking up,
and how MakeLifeEasy can help to resolve them:
- How do I track my inventory and create a smart shopping list?
- How do I avoid extra trips?
- How do I know if the price is good?
- How do I avoid overbuying?
- How do I avoid overusing?
MakeLifeEasy is for businesses, too!
We've made MakeLifeEasy personal enough for consumers to use,
and most of the starting data is customized for a consumer's household.
But many businesses can't find suitable inventory management software.
If you're one of them,
you'll find that MakeLifeEasy will pay for itself many times over.
1. Creating a Smart Shopping List
Tracking your inventory is the foundation for expert purchasing and use of re-ordered products.
You don't track inventory for its own sake; you do it for the knowledge it gives you.
Use MakeLifeEasy to track your inventory:
enter assets as you purchase them, and check (or print out)
your smart shopping list before you visit the store.
Here's the basic process for tracking inventory and getting a smart shopping list:
- Create a MakeLifeEasy account and sign up as a full member.
Sure, it costs $2.95 per month. But it's risk-free to try it,
and we'll bet you can save that much in terms of
the time you spend shopping, the product price savings you get, and the mistakes you avoid.
The full membership allows you to enter "supplies" (products you buy that need replenishing),
so that you can get the full benefits of expert shopping.
SPECIFICS: Go to the New Account setup page in
this window or a
new window. Create a new account and sign up for full membership.
- After each shopping trip, enter the supply-type items you've purchased that you want to track.
SPECIFICS: Once you have an account, go to the Receipts page in
this window or a
new window. Create a record of the new shopping trip,
and load the assets you want to track.
Press F2 or click on "Help" if needed.
- Before each shopping trip, check your smart shopping list
for the things you need to buy now and advice on how to buy them.
SPECIFICS: Once you have an account, view your Smart Shopping Lists page in
this window or a
new window.
- Select the top folder (the store type) you're looking for,
the "days left" that you want to see, and press "Go".
- View the list sorted by "Days Left"
so you can see the items you will need first at the top of the list.
- Do a quick inventory (physical check) of the items that have risen to the top of the list.
Make any inventory adjustments needed by clicking on the "Need" name and adjusting the asset levels.
Again, press F2 or click on "Help" if needed.
You now have your smart shopping list for this trip:
all the items that need re-purchasing, along with buying advice.
You might want to print it out and take it with you.
2. Avoiding Extra Trips
Warehouse stores are great places to visit... but not too often, right?
The "overhead" of visiting is high: crowded parking, crowded stores, long lines, etc.
Don't you hate it when you walk out and realize you forgot something?
Or you notice the next day that you should have stocked up on laundry detergent, too?
Let's say you want to visit the store once every four weeks to re-stock your "supplies".
If you've been tracking your inventory, it's very easy:
when you review your smart shopping list,
just make sure you list all your assets that will be depleted before your next two desired visits.
- For example, say you prefer to shop at the warehouse club store on the first of each month, and today is February 27.
So your next visit will be March 1, and you'll want to view all the items on your smart shopping list
that will be depleted before April 1.
SPECIFICS: On your smart shopping list, set the "Days left" filter to at least 60 days,
and review the items that have less than 33 days left (Feb 27 to April 1).
When necessary, take a quick inventory of all these items,
and make sure you re-stock them on your March 1 visit.
This way, you won't be caught by surprise and have to make a trip in the middle of the month.
3. Getting a Good Price
Are you getting a good price for the products you're buying in the warehouse club stores?
It's often hard to tell, especially since the prices are in odd numbers and most warehouse club
sizes aren't sold in non-warehouse stores.
This may or may not surprise you, but
non-warehouse stores can sometimes have better buys on the same products, even in smaller sizes.
If you know that you can get a price that's close, the same, or even better at a non-warehouse store,
you may find it easier to split your purchases between stores.
MakeLifeEasy currently provides one way to help find this out,
and we're working on an even better way in the future.
To find out now, you need to experiment a little by purchasing the same product or a comparable product
at a competing store.
MakeLifeEasy provides a single, convenient central place to record and analyze these purchases.
Just use the method described above for tracking inventory.
Then, when you're getting ready to visit the store,
you can review your Buying Advice and/or your Seller Performance Report
to see which merchant has provided the best price.
- You can review your Buying Advice for a specific need (shopping list item).
SPECIFICS: On your Smart Shopping List page (opened above),
click on the need name (the name of the shopping list item) in question
to display the Need Properties page, and
(a) click on "Asset History" to view and compare past purchases, and/or
(c) click on "Buying Advice" to view the Buying Advice panel.
- You can review your Seller Performance Report to see how sellers compare
in terms of the prices they offer to cover single needs, or a whole store-full of items.
You'll need to have enough data from the different stores you're comparing to make the report meaningful.
SPECIFICS: Go to the Seller Performance Summary page in
this window or a
new window. You can click on "Show details..." next to a store name
to see how that store compares for a specific need.
In the future, we'll be providing you with offers from merchants to cover your needs,
if you want to receive them.
That way, when a need is moving near the top of your shopping list,
a merchant can offer to fulfill it for you at a better price than you've been paying.
4. Avoiding Overbuying
One common problem with buying larger sizes is buying too much.
For example, you may buy more than you can consume before the product expires.
When buying from warehouse stores, customers will do this without even knowing it.
We've talked about this problem and its solution in a special article called
How To... Avoid Overbuying.
5. Avoiding Overusing
Once you buy a large quantity of a product,
you face a very common problem among warehouse store shoppers: you overuse it.
That big 1-gallon carton of goldfish crackers should have lasted at least a month! So why is it empty?
Well, in that case it's obvious (!), but it happens with products that are not so obvious, too,
including personal care products, cleaning supplies, etc.
MakeLifeEasy currently provides one way to help stop overusage,
and we're working on another way in the future.
What works now is that you determine your usage rate for any sample product(s)
that you think you might be over-consuming.
You can do it for just one product or for as many as you like.
Load the product (along with its size and price) when you purchase it
and then record when it becomes depleted.
Do this for as many products as needed to get a good average.
Then MakeLifeEasy can calculate two key factors:
your usage rate of the product and your cost per day for the product.
When you use MakeLifeEasy to track inventory and manage assets,
it will automatically calculate usage rates and costs per day for the assets you are tracking,
so you really don't have to do anything special to gradually learn whether you are overusing certain products.
However, here is one sequence that allows you to specifically get usage rates
and compare them as quickly as possible. Use the help function (F2) on any page for more details:
- Use MakeLifeEasy as you normally would to track your assets.
Enter purchases (described above) and adjust inventory levels (described above).
- When you deplete an asset that you think you may have been using too fast,
search for the need it covers on the Search Needs page.
- Click on the Need name to display the Need Properties page,
which will automatically open to the Current Assets panel.
- Find the asset you've depleted in the list,
adjust its amount to the correct value, and save the results.
Now your asset database will be up to date.
- Click on the "A" (Analyze) button for any other asset in the list to
display the Usage Rate Analysis page for this need's assets.
You can compare your usage rate of this asset with the usage rate(s) of
other asset(s) purchased from other stores to see if it seems too high.
- Alternately, you can view your Cost Per Day Curve to see if
it's costing you too much per day to satisfy this need,
and whether that's because you're using it too rapidly,
or because you're paying too much.
In the future, we'll help you to find products you're overusing whether you suspect it or not.
To do this, we'll build up our customer database
to include usage rates and costs per day for several customers.
Then we can share this data between customers,
and you can see how your usage rates stack up
and whether you can reduce your usage rates of some products.
Our members will help each other to do this.
More Points
- MakeLifeEasy helps with lots of other purchases besides "supplies".
Check out these topics on managing other kinds of items you can buy at warehouse clubs:
- Even if you don't use all the inventory management features, such as usage rates,
it can help you just to track your purchases, so that you can see how many weeks or
months ago you last purchased a product. This can give you a simple estimate of what you'll need
to re-stock before you go to the store. MakeLifeEasy provides a simple, central place
for recording purchases that can give you other expert shopping benefits as well.
- Our MakeLifeEasy Affiliate Program has just started,
and you can help to get online merchants into the alliance.
The field is wide open, not only including the giants like Costco and Sam's Club,
but the many smaller internet merchants that offer specialized lines at deep discounts.
Get your preferred merchants into the alliance and make large commissions.
See The Affiliate Program for Customers.
- Hey, nice work!
When you shop at wholesale clubs, you're also helping the environment - at least in a small way -
since large sizes usually have less packaging per amount of usable product,
and you're (hopefully) making less shopping trips.
- And, of course, having a plan when you shop helps you to avoid impulse purchases,
and that can save you a lot of money.
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