How myQ Made Our Black Friday/Cyber Monday Shopping Convenient and Worry Free!

Shopping Online while Traveling

We travel…a lot! And we tend to do a lot of online shopping while we travel. I touched on this in my last post – specifically that we always find local foods/ingredients overseas but it’s a hassle to bring everything back, so we place online orders. But there are a lot more reasons we love having a myQ-connected smart garage as well:

There are Holiday Sales

We have a love-hate relationship with holiday shopping. We’re never going to fight the crowds to purchase something in-store on Thanksgiving or Black Friday just because it’s a few dollars cheaper. However, if something that we need is less expensive during a holiday sale, especially when we’re buying gifts for our kids or others, there’s no reason not to take advantage of the sales and pay less.

We Want to Prepare for the Holidays

We always travel before holidays (including Bermuda this year for Thanksgiving), and very frequently during our vacation we’ll think through what we need to get for the holidays. This could be regional ingredients or spices, but it could also be that we remember that we need new lights for the Christmas tree, or that we’re out of wrapping paper, or have teacher gifts coming up. We arrive home with most or all of our shopping and holiday prep taken care of.

We Lose Things

We’re pretty good with not leaving things behind on airplanes or in hotel rooms, but we’re not perfect. The past couple years we’ve lost three Kindles, a kids’ sweater, a windbreaker and a headphone case. In all cases we go online and purchase a replacement while we’re still traveling.

We love Kindles, but have lost several over the years. Amazon Prime to the rescue.

We Discover Travel Things that We Need

We have a packing cube filled with travel essentials that we take with us on every trip. It has blue painters tape, a Frisbee, kids’ medicines, instant coffee and a lot more. In every instance it’s because we’ve been somewhere and realized that we could use something that we added it to the pack, and we’ve always ordered things while we travel. “Hmmm, we could really use a portable clothesline. Let’s order one now so we don’t forget when we get home.”

And sometimes it’s luggage. During a trip we may wish that we had a particular size of extra duffel, or we realize that we could have gotten by with smaller suitcases. If it’s seems like something that we want to change before our next trip, we shop online.

Walking to the ferry in Naxos Greece with all of our luggage for several weeks in Europe. We're always reevaluating what setup will make travel as easy as possible. — Walking to the ferry in Naxos Greece with all of our luggage for several weeks in Europe. We’re always reevaluating what setup will make travel as easy as possible – and then ordering new bags online when we figure it out.

The Kids are Growing

Have you ever gone on vacation only to discover that your kids have grown a lot and, wow, their shorts, or swimsuit, or shoes are smaller than you realized? Or that their swim goggles have seen better days? It happens to us all the time! So we place orders.

Ordering replacement swim goggles from the pool in Singapore

Package Safety

All of this is to say, whether it’s an item that we purchase because it’s on sale, something for the upcoming holiday or a new or replacement travel item, there’s always another box being delivered to our house. And we’re not home. But it’s not a problem, because we have a myQ-connected smart garage!

It took me less than half an hour to install the myQ Smart Garage Hub, including downloading the myQ App, pairing the App and the Smart Garage Hub, and linking everything to my Amazon Prime account via the Amazon Key App. Then all we have to do is select “in-garage delivery” during Amazon Prime check out.

An added benefit to myQ: we can open up our garage from anywhere in the world if a petsitter, guest or neighbor needs access. — An added benefit to myQ: we can open up our garage from anywhere in the world if a pet-sitter, guest or neighbor needs access.

How Does In-Garage Delivery Work?

When a driver arrives at our house, he/she requests to open our garage door via his/her Amazon delivery device. Amazon verifies that that package(s) belong to us and that the driver is near the correct door, and then the door opens. The driver leaves the packages inside, exits, closes the door, and then as soon as the door is closed, moves on to the next house.

How easy is that? Seriously, before you purchase anything else online for the holidays this year, install a myQ Smart Garage Hub. Then, whether you’re at work or halfway around the world, you’ll have the peace of mind of knowing that your packages are safe and dry. It’s the coolest use of smart home technology that I’ve found – all of our online Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping this year was worry-free!

Notes

This post was sponsored by Chamberlain Group.

In-garage delivery is currently available to Amazon Prime members in 50 cities and surrounding areas and is expanding – check to see if your area is eligible here.