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As I’ve written before, I was one of the luck people who was able to snag a Nintendo Wii last year. This year I want another one for my niece, but this year I’m playing it smart. I’m gong to tell you how to play it smart, too and get a Nintendo Wii while sitting around in your underwear in front of the computer all day.
ZOMG!! CLICK CLICK CLICK!!…
Calm down. This is just a graphic of the OuttaStock.com Wii Finder Widget.
Last year I did what everyone else was doing: I drove around every town every Sunday morning around 4am, found a likely store to camp out in front of and spent the next three hours standing around in the cold with a bunch of desperate parents, only to find that we had 100 people in line and the store that we were standing in front of only had 10 Wii game systems for sale. And though I used all the super-secret rumor mill forums and spoke to the retail flunkies and even found sites that showed maps of my town with likely Wii systems for sale, I realized that the whole process of chasing down something in a brick and mortar store was relatively labor intensive.
And I am, if nothing else, pretty damn lazy.
So instead of focusing on physical stores, I started paying attention to online stores. I spend 90% of my day in front of a PC, so I’m always about 30 seconds away from an online store that might be selling a Nintendo Wii.
This year there are some great services which monitor Wii availability online and notify you instantly when a Nintendo Wii is being offered for sale. There are a lot of these services, but I had some basic criteria: the service had to be easy, reliable, and FREE. There’s no guarantee I’ll get a Wii, so I didn’t see the point in paying for a service that didn’t guarantee me anything.
Here they are:
Wiialerts.com - A pretty neat service that will send you a cell phone text message or email the moment a Wii is available from one of about 14 different Wii console or bundles for sale from various vendors. The site is free and heavily emphasizes the cell phone text message over the email because text messages are apparently sent a little more instantaneously. I’ve had varying success with this service. I’ve received about 4 or 5 messages from them in the past two weeks. One was a text message, one message was actually legit but I wasn’t near a PC and three of the messages seemed to arrive late when no Wii were available.
Wiitracker.com - A pretty good service that monitors one of the largest lists of Wii bundles and options I’ve seen. The best way to use this is to subscribe to the RSS feed and just have it check every couple of minutes. At the bottom of the screen they offer a full history of all the times and dates various Wii bundles have been available. This is somewhat useful in that you can see that many less expensive bundles sell out in about five minutes and you can sometimes see some patterns in when certain vendors offer Nintendo Wiis.
RefreshThing.com - This is a small service that I used successfully last year to snag my own Nintendo Wii from Circuit City and help several people in my office do the same. This page updates automatically every 30 seconds, so the idea is you just keep it up in the background and keep and eye on it. The page only lists 17 Wii Bundles for sale and counts some strange places like JC Penney and eBay as valid sites to get a Nintendo Wii. It often gives false positives and it uselessly tags Amazon.com as having available Wiis all the time because you can buy one for $400. Really, when people are using a service to track down a Nintendo Wii they aren’t looking to pay $400+ for a $250 item.
OuttaStock.com Wii Finder - If you’re going to use only one online service, you might want to consider this one. They have a fair number of Wii Bundles and they never seem to give a false positive on their site. The nice thing about this service is they offer a Widget you can install and just leave up on your PC all day, checking for Wii availability. Yes, there is a Mac and a Windows Version (which uses Yahoo Widgets). When a Wii is available you click on the widget, which takes you to the site which lists availability. Click on that link and you’re set. This has been a pretty good site this year. I’ve seen a Wii available about five times now and each time it’s been dead on. Yes, sometimes they are expensive bundles, but I even caught it at the very tail end of an Amazon availability once, though I was too late to complete my order.
The season is still young, so I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to get a Wii. Like I mentioned, there are patterns to when certain sites seem to offer Nintendo Wiis. Based on these patterns I will tell you that you might want to pay attention to Amazon.com right around noon central time.
Good luck, never buy from Buy.com and happy Wii Hunting!
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