Gather Little by Little

As a frequent online shopper it can be difficult to find what online merchant carries which items and at which price. Comparison shopping on the internet is one of the key ways to find the best deal and save yourself a lot money. Surfing around the internet to find who carries what and at what price can be tedious and time consuming. Fortunately there are a few sites that I like to use that make the process easy:

PriceGrabber.com – PriceGrabber.com allows you to search for the item you are interested in purchasing and will reply with a list of online merchants selling the item along with their online price. The site allows you to search by price, bottom line price (item price plus shipping and taxes), or by seller rating. One nice feature of PriceGrammer.com is their Price Alert feature which allows you to enter the item you are interested in along with the price you are willing to pay. When your PriceGrabber finds an item at the price you are willing to pay, it will email you.

Google Product Search (formally froogle.com) – I am not sure why Google decided to rename it’s shopping site from Froogle to Google Product search, as I really liked the Froogle name. Regardless, Google Product Search (GPS) is the same. GPS allows is similar to PriceGrabber, and allows you to find items you are looking for and sort by price, seller ranking. GPS provides one additional feature, which is product ranking. Product ranking is nice when you are interested in purchasing a particular type of product but aren’t sure which specific brand to purchase.

Jellyfish.com – Like the prior sites, Jellyfish.com allows you to search and price compare items you are interested, but with a twist. First off, Jellyfish.com has a much nicer user interface and has a Web 2.0 look and feel. One big difference is that Jellyfish gets a commission for each item they refer you to and you purchase, the neat thing is Jellyfish share 50% of that commission back to you for credit on your next purchase or you can wait until you have $10 or more and have them cut a check to you. I haven’t used this site much, but plan to going forward. It even has some social aspects to it!

Other sites I liked include but weren’t particularly noteworthy are: Nextag.com, MySimon (although I must admit, their logo creeps me out a bit), and Shopzilla (love the colors)

For a complete list of other sites take a look at this directory listing from Google.

As with any purchase, taking the time to price shop and do a little research is always a good thing and can pay off in money saved. One point when online shopping, a number of very shady retailers will low-ball their prices using these sites and then claim to no longer stock it, claim it is back-ordered, etc and then try to up sell you to something more expensive. Make sure you pay attention to the seller ratings, and only buy from reputable sellers. Remember even online, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

What tips do you have for online shopping? Do you use any comparisons sites and if so which ones?