While searching for some good deals on web hosting, I discovered an amusing trait of many of the hosting companies that I looked at. That trait illustrates a very important buyer’s rule: Never pay the sticker price.

I was checking out FatCow.com for hosting and was inspecting the checkout page when I had a change of heart. I clicked the close button for the tab but was greeted with this passionate plea:

Okay, first I’d like to say that I hate any kind of hijacking of my tab when I try to browse away from a tab. It is evil. Unless it saves me some money… in which case it’s still evil, and I still cast suspicious glances at the business practices of the company, but I’ll save my eGold any way I can.

If you click on “Cancel” in the warning message above, you’ll be sent to this page:

It should be noted that in spite of FatCow’s deal, I was won over by SiteGround for all of my hosting needs. They’re not so bad… but beware that their DNS management is terrible. That warrants an entirely different post, however.

FatCow isn’t the only place that uses this grey-area marketing tactic. Even while shopping at GoDaddy, thinking that they had the best prices for registering six TLDs for a new business venture, I abandoned my cart when @NameCheap said they could do better. Ultimately I ended up sticking with NameCheap, however a few days later I received an email from GoDaddy saying that they were willing to take a percentage off of the items that I had abandoned.

The moral of the story is to never pay full price for anything. If you’re buying something online, it’s worth clicking around, closing windows, abandoning carts and just going away for a while. If that doesn’t cough up anything, you can always write customer service and ask for a better deal. The worst they could say is “No”.