Searching for and Reserving Items

On this website, you can make reservations for in-store pick-up or place orders for shipping to your home.

In-store pick-up: Selecting a pick-up store of “Tampa” or “Pinellas” will direct your searches to that store. If you want to reserve an item, the selected location is where you can pick up the items that same day. Your item is picked by our staff and will be awaiting your arrival. You also have the option to extend your searches to include both locations. Reserved items from other stores will take a few days to arrive at your chosen pick-up location. You pay the same prices as if you were shopping in the store yourself. There are no charges for these added services.  Reservations are paid for in-store at time of pick-up.

Shipping:  By selecting “Ship to Me” as your pick-up location, you may search for, order, and pay for items on our web site and have them shipped to you. Read more here.

Tips for Searching

Type your search term into the search bar. Often this will be the artist, title, UPC, and/or format of the item you’re looking for. Capitalization does not matter.  Err on the side of being too general rather than too specific. Some examples of useful search terms and their results:

  • “slayer cd”: This will give you all CDs with “Slayer” in the artist or title field.
  • “empire strikes back”: This will give you all items of any format with “Empire Strikes Back” in the artist or title field.
  • “beatles vinyl”: This will give you all vinyl records with “Beatles” in the artist or title field.

Narrow your initial results by making selections from the drop-down menus or left-hand menu:

  • Example: Click on a format and genre on the left-hand menu.  This function is especially useful when you’re searching for items by artists that have common names. Let’s say you’re looking for the band “Yes”.  If you type “yes” in the search box, you’ll get many results for items that have nothing to do with the band Yes. But if you then click on “CD” and then “Classic Rock” on the left-hand menu, you will narrow it down to just Classic Rock CDs that have the word “Yes” in the artist or title field.
  • Example: Only want to look at used items? Select “Used” from the “New/Used” drop-down menu.

Sort your results by Artist, Title, Format, New Price, or Used Price by clicking the arrows at the top of the column. Click a second time to make sort the results in the other direction.  This function is useful for grouping all results by a single band together, or for looking at the least/most expensive items in the search results, etc.

If you would prefer to just browse instead of entering a search term, you can! Go to the search page and click on something in the left-hand menu: Pick a format and a genre, or browse the new arrivals (items new to the sales floor) or pending arrivals (items in the 15-day hold that will be available soon).

Questions about searching? Contact us!

Please note…

When reserving from this website, it is important you realize you are still shopping in a retail store (with the help of our staff). This means sometimes we will not be able to find an item that you reserve. Just like when you are in the store shopping yourself, an item may be misplaced or in the hands of other customers. We do a pretty good job in that regard so you should expect that we’ll find everything most every time.

Why can’t I reserve Pending items?

Sound Exchange does not accept reservations for Pending Items (those items in the 15-day hold period required by Florida law). The reason is to protect the best interests of our local customers shopping in our bricks and mortar stores. We want to avoid the scenario in which an item comes out of the hold box and directly into a hold stack for a customer, without ever having made its way onto the sales floor. One proactive way that any of our local customers can receive preference for titles that they want is to use our “Notify Me” capability. Simply use the “Search” feature on our web site for the item you want, scroll down to the Notify Me section, and click the button next to the item you want to receive an email notification about when we next purchase it in one of our stores. It’s that easy! You can then reserve it as soon as it is available for purchase.

IMPORTANT: If you change your delivery location you will lose the contents of your Shopping Cart.