Now that you know how to shop, where should you spend your money online? Just a few short years ago, if you wanted to find the best bargains on the Web, you had to manually visit the sites of dozens of different online retailersa very time-consuming process. Not so today, as there are numerous sites that exist to automatically do this price comparison for you. Go to a price comparison site, find the product you want, and have the site return a list of merchants offering that product, along with current prices. Choose the merchant that offers what you want, and you're ready to buy! note
Price Comparison SitesThe best of these price comparison sites offer more than just pricing information. These full-service sites let you sort and filter their search results in a number of different ways, and often include customer reviews of both the products and the available merchants. Some even let you perform side-by-side comparisons of multiple products, which is great if you haven't yet made up your mind as to what you want to buy. The most popular (and useful) of these price comparison sites include
Comparing Prices at Shopping.comAll of these comparison shopping sites are good, but my favorite is Shopping.com (shown in Figure 22.1). What I really like about Shopping.com is that it gives you more than just simple price comparisons; you also get customer reviews of both products and merchants, to help you make better purchase decisions. Figure 22.1. Comparing products and prices at Shopping.com.Like all the other price comparison sites, Shopping.com enables you to either search for specific products or browse through major product categories. Whether you search or browse, you eventually end up at a product listing page like the one shown in Figure 22.2. From here you can filter the results by price, product type, brand, or other product attributes. You can sort the results by best matches (default), price, or product rating. (The product ratings are provided by the customers at Epinions.com.) You can also display the products as a grid rather than a list by clicking the View as a Grid link. Figure 22.2. The results of a product search at Shopping.com.When you're in the process of choosing a particular product, Shopping.com makes it easy to perform side-by-side product comparisons. Just check the Check to Compare boxes next to the items you're looking at, and then click the Compare Products button. The result is a chart with the features of each product displayed in tabular format. tip
To learn more about a particular product, click the Compare Prices button. This displays a product page where you can read detailed product information (by clicking the See Full Specifications link) or customer reviews (by clicking the Read Epinions Reviews link). Below the product picture is a listing of all stores carrying this product. You can sort this list by store name, store rating (from Epinions.com customers), base price, or total price. When you're ready to buy, click the Buy It button to go directly to the merchant's product page. |