Yahoo! Finance - Financially Fit

Yahoo! Finance - Financially Fit
Some things TO BUY at Amazon:
Surprising Things to Buy

While you can get just about anything you want on the site, what are the standouts you may not have thought of? We spoke to analysts, retailers, and shoppers themselves to discover some surprising categories.

Auto Parts

Easily searchable by make, model, and year, Amazon's Auto Store offers more than 4 million car, truck, and other vehicle parts to DIYers, enthusiasts, and professionals. "Many of the products offered by Amazon are fulfilled and shipped by brick-and-mortar automotive parts stores and warehouses," says Richard White, senior vice president of the Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association."That is how they are able to offer such a vast assortment of product." There are 3,800 parts for the 1968 Pontiac Firebird alone, for example, and nearly 2,000 for a 1990 VW Cabriolet.

Computer Peripherals and Accessories

Cables, thumb drives, external hard drives, and other computer accessories aren't routinely evaluated by computer magazines. But they are amply and (sometimes) succinctly "reviewed" by thousands of Amazon.com shoppers. That critical mass of opinion saves you the time and the energy of doing the research yourself. "If there are 150 four-star reviews, that's big information you can go with," says Scott Stein, senior editor at CNET.com. And that same review crew flushes out subpar products and vetoes them just as concisely. Plus, Amazon's prices on these items are typically 10 to 20 percent lower than competitors. A recent study by Internet analyst Mark Miller of William Blair found that Amazon and Best Buy's retail stores have a merchandise overlap of nearly 70 percent, and 87 percent of those items sell for less on Amazon.