Contact lenses comparison

Since my last post about contact lenses I noticed that Asda have a good online optician.

Whilst I was looking at their site today I noticed that they had compared all the prices of their contact lenses with those at Specsavers. They have made a little comparison table for all the contact lenses that they both sell, to make it nice and easy to see the relative savings.

According to their figures which they say they collected on the 15th August 2007, they reveal that you can save £3.90 a month if you buy the own brand Dailies at Asda rather than Specsavers, that is a saving of £46.80 a year! - Which is not a bad saving for buying the same product elsewhere.

I don't know whether they saw my comparison table and thought they would try and do one better, but it serves to show that there are real savings to be made if you buy yours online. We recommend comparing the prices at all the shops on our table before committing to buy.

Exclusive codes

Occasionally we get given exclusive codes for money off at various shops. Today we were given 2 exclusive discount codes for 2 clothing and fashion shops, Cloggs and Rivet.

Both of these shops sell a wide variety of designer clothes, boots and shoes for men, women and kids.

The discount codes are valid for 5% off all orders. Cloggs has free UK delivery on all items and Rivet has free delivery on orders over £50.

Both these shops are well worth checking out, as are all our exclusive voucher codes. They also have a good back to school selection.

Dell voucher code

Dell, the direct computer seller, do not often issue discount codes for the UK market. They usually rely on their aggressive pricing and their special offers which are advertised in the press, online and on Television.

As a back to school special offer, Dell have, for August bank holiday issued a voucher code for an Inspiron Laptop. The specific model is the Inspiron 1521, which is an AMD Turon processor, with 1024MB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM and Windows Vista Home Premium edition.

The Dell discount code is in addition to the special offer price which they are currently offering and has reduced the price of the laptop from £639 to £549. This include VAT and delivery. So an extra 10% off constitutes very good value for a quality laptop from a good name such as Dell.

As this is quite rare and represents good value and a relitively cheap price for a Dell laptop we recommend you give it further investigation.

What is it with LCD TVs at the moment?

I know that certain products sell well at certain times of the year, for example BBQs in the Summer and Wooly Jumpers in the Winter. So obviously I would expect SendMeDiscounts to be given and for the merchants to announce sales and discount codes for particular products at particular times of the year.

But this last week a few of the electrical retailers have started to annonce discount codes just for LCD TVs. Currys, Dixons, Comet and Pixmania have all released codes just for LCD and Plasma TVs.

I don't know if they are just trying to have some sort of price war, or whether this is the right time of year for people to be buying a new LCD TV. Is everyone looking for one now what with the bad weather, or is summer historically, when people are outside, a bad time for TV sales? I don't know, but in recent years they have come rapidly down in price and the quality is better than ever. Perhaps it is just that and now is a good time to purchase one.

If you are interested in the LCD TV discount codes we have, follow the link. Some are for specific models, such as the GRUNDIG GU15WDPCX or the SAMSUNG LE32R88BD others are for the entire range at the shop.

I don't know much about LCD TVs but I notice that DooYoo have a lot of reviews and some useful information which might make buying one a bit easier. Especially now that there are plenty of discounts for them.

Cheaper Contact Lenses

I wear contact lenses which I get from the high street optician Boots, and I have been doing so for many years.

I have a few friends who buy their contact lenses online and are always telling me that it is easy and cheaper to do it that way. I was aware of some of the online optometrists but did not really know how to go about buying them online or how much they would cost.

So after my DVD rental comparison I thought I would do the same comparison for online contact lens opticians to find the cheapest and best.

I managed to find 4 good contact lenses shops online, Get Lenses, Lens base, Sainsbury's contact lenses and Vision Direct. All of them sell a wide variety of contact lenses and have all the common manufacturers and types in stock such as AcuVue, Focus dailies, Pure vision and even Toric lenses, for daily, monthly and longer term eye wear.

The cost of most of the lenses varied from site to site, all of them offer different prices and packages according to which lenses you want and how many you need.

I knew that my Boots lenses are just repackaged versions of one of the leading brands, so I had no trouble in working out that I could buy my contact lenses at any of the stores, some of them like Sainsbury's even have a guide which tells you which own brand lenses are the same type.

Some of the opticians offer free delivery and it is easy to select and pay for the contacts you require from any of the optometrists. The only thing you need to buy them, apart from your credit or debit card, is an up to date precription for your eyes. None of the opticians will sell you contact lenses without a valid and recent prescription, so you still need to get your eyes tested regularly and get a prescription from your optician, although some of the online ones will help you get one, Sainsbury offer 20% off aftercare with Dollond and Aitchison for example.

I won't go into a comprehensive comparison of all prices as that would be too complicated, considering all the different types, brands and package options, but if you wish to use my easy to read contact lens comparison table, please follow the link. You should be able to find a cheaper alternative from one of those online opticians than from your high street equivalent.

The maze that is DVD rental

The other week I thought I would take a look at online DVD rental. I usually rent my DVDs from the local Blockbuster at about £3 a go, plus any late fees when I forget to take one back.

Seeing a lot of advertising for the online DVD subscription clubs, I thought I would investigate. I created a table of the leading DVD rental companies to make it easy to compare DVD rental.

I did find the array of different packages a bit confusing, you can choose between limited and unlimited subscriptions, where you can rent either as many as you like in a month, or only 1 or 2. Some companies such as Cinema Paradiso or LOVEFiLM have about 6 different packages each! All rental firms post the films to you and when you have finished watching them you simply post them back in a pre-paid envelope and order another film.

Whatever package you decide to choose, all the film rental firms offer a free trial normally for 21-30 days, so you should be able to work out if it is worth joining or not in that period.

I don't think that I do watch enough in a month to warrant joining one, so will probably continue visiting my local DVD store when I fancy watching something, but it was interesting doing the comparison anyway.

Electrical discount codes

Dixons Group or DSG tend to release a lot of discount codes on a fairly regular basis, for instance Dixons released about 36 new codes all for different product types about a week ago; and this week Currys released 6 new codes, each one gives a different discount according to the amount you spend on one product type, LCD TVs.

So I thought I would have a quick look and compare several electrical retailers for the same or similar product to see exactly how good one of those Currys discount codes are.

I have chosen a mid-range LCD TV from the Currys website, the SAMSUNG LE37R88BD. Now first of all I know that each manufacturer makes slightly different models for some of their retailers, but I think this model should be good for comparison. It is a 37" HD ready digital LCD TV. In Currys before any discounts it costs £684.99.

Now to find it at other retailers and compare. I Googled the name and found about 915 results.

The first result is from Pixmania which has it on sale for £598.10 with free delivery. Dixons appears about 6 on the list and you might expect the price to be the same as Currys, but it is in fact £615.00, with delivery of £4.95.

I also had a look on Kelkoo which only showed those 3 retailers and the same prices. Of course Kelkoo and the other price comparison sites do not list the voucher codes.

The similar Samsung LE37R87 at Kelkoo shows many more retailers with prices from about £630-£598, although the cheapest shop wanted as much as £79 for specific day delivery.

Because the price at Currys is over £600 then we can use one of their voucher codes that will apply a £60 discount. This brings the price down to £624.99.

Dixons also have a voucher code for a 2.5% discount which brings the price down to £599, more in line with the Pixmania price. Sometimes Pixmania release voucher codes too, but at the time of writing there were no valid ones.

So although the Currys voucher code does apply a generous discount, the price was higher to begin with anyway. Dixons who had a better starting price was better after using their discount code, but Pixmania without any code had the best price on this particular product, and usually they provide a code which would have made the price even better.

Whilst this comparison will not be typical of all products and is for a very specific LCD TV, I think that this excercise shows that instead of buying at a shop because it produces a discount code, it is worth comparing retailers to find the best one before you buy. On Sendmediscounts.co.uk we have tried to make comparisons between same-type retailers easy, so you can quickly see who is the cheapest shop to buy from.

Compare credit card special offers

Recently we took down the credit card offer comparison page. This was because we were not able to update it frequently enough, but now thanks to some streamlining we have done to the updating of Sendmediscounts.co.uk as a whole, it should now be easier to keep all the offers for credit cards up to date.

So that feature is back up. If you would like to see what credit card offers we have listed please visit the page, we hope to have many more offers listed soon, so if you are thinking of doing a balance transfer or looking for a new 0% credit card keep an eye out on the page.

We hope to set up more comparisons for other financial products such as loans and insurance too.

Lots of demand for Setanta discount codes

Today is the first day of the Football Premiership so I don't find it too surprising that a lot of people will be wanting to watch the matches on TV.

I was surprised to find whilst trawling through my stats package that I had a lot of visitors looking for discount codes for Setanta TV.

Setanta are the new TV channel who have managed to buy some rights to the Premier League and Champions league football. The price of subscription is only £9.99 a month which is far less that the £34 I think Sky charge for the privilege.

Well unfortunately I am yet to see any Setanta discount vouchers, but I know Talk Talk are doing some sort of promotion, which includes 2 months free subscription and a free set top box. We have details of the Setanta offer at Talk Talk on Sendmediscounts.

I think the best Sky Offer is a £5 credit when you subscribe.

It looks like if you are a football fan and wish to watch the new season from the comfort of your own home then Setanta is worth investigating.

New voucher codes this week

This week sees the release of a load of new discount codes for Woolworths, Currys and The Link to name a few.

Curry's have produced 5 new discount codes with a maximum of £120 of savings. These are only valid on currys.co.uk and expire on the 14th of August so you have to be quick if you wish to take advantage of these. More details can be found here Currys Voucher codes

Woolworths, not known for often producing discount codes have released a special code for summer with a saving of £70 and an extra 10% off. The promotion is called "The Big Red Book" and the details are on their website and is available until 9th September 2007. We have details of the Woolworths voucher code here.

Another of the DSG brands, the mobile phone shop The Link have also relaesed a new voucher code. I believe this is tied into the launch of their new website. The discount is for Pay as you go mobile phones and equates to a 10% saving. Other promotions include a free Nintendo Wii and iPod, so The Link really do seem to be pushing the boat out this summer. Now might be a good time to upgrade or get a new mobile.

New blog to replace the News postings

We have decided to replace the somewhat erratic and unpredictable news postings with something that should be easier to keep up to date and be more useful to read - the shop discounts blog!

I am hoping that here we will be able to post regularly about the weekly additions to SendMeDiscounts and any other interesting bargains and discounts that come ourway, as well as developments to the site and any important information; as well as being a place for allowing others to comment and add suggestions.

So please have a look around and if you do have any suggestions please let us know.