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Features on things wordy, geeky, and webbyShopping Price Comparison Sites and Discount Stores
Sunday, December 18th, 2005 at 10:34 AM | 13 commentsWith all the price comparison sites available, I’m posting them all in one post because it’s just tough to keep up and remember them all. The first three places I go whenever I shop are Froogle, Pricegrabber, and ISBN.nu.
I don’t just buy from the place offernig the best price. It also depends on the business’ reputation. If no ratings are available for the business, then I search elsewhere like the Better Business Bureau and BizRate. Offertrax lets you store, compare and receive price alerts.
Pronto is a Firefox shopping comparison plugin.
Another thing to consider is the best time of the year to shop for certain items. MSN Money lists the best times of the year for the following:
Air conditioners best time: winter
Airline tickets best time: Depends
Big appliances best time: September and October
Bicycles and outdoor gear Best time: January
Boats best time: January, February and March
Cars best time: September
Cell phones best time: any time
Computers best time: July and August
Cookware best times: April and May; October and November
Furniture best times: January and July
Gas grills best time: winter
Jewelry best time: Avoid the holidays, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day
Linens and bedding best time: January
Mattresses best time: always
Real estate best time: spring
Recreational vehicles best time: fall and winter
Toys best time: October and November
TVs and home theaters best time: winter holiday sales and January
Vacuum cleaners best time: April and May
Wedding best time: winter
Most Often Used
Froogle results look like typical search engine results. It also explores sites that often don’t appear in the comparison shopping site lists. I’ve found some great deals here.
Pricegrabber is the one I go to the most outside of Froogle. I think its comparison chart is the easiest to read and scan.
PriceScan is similar to Pricegrabber and easier to read than the ones listed further down.
Books
AddAll does books, music, movie, and magazine.
Best Book Buys also compares book prices as well as music, videos, electronics, and bikes.
BooksPrice searches for lowest price on new and used books, CDs and DVDs. Also includes a feature for finding the best price when buying more than one book since shipping costs could be lower due to the combined order.
ISBN.nu does only price comparisons for books. While I find better deals through Amazon Marketplace or elsewhere, this is a great starting point.
Local Stores
General Price Comparison Sites
The following sites are similar in how they produce their results and they don’t have a neat chart like Pricegrabber or MySimon. Their results are similar to Froogle, but I think Froogle provides better results. I recommend using a few sites when looking for a specific item as every site links to different stores.
CostHelper reports what people are paying.
MySimon is one of the first price comparison sites I’ve used. Its site doesn’t look good in Firefox.
SearchAllDeals searches all deals and coupon sites in one shot.
Coupons and Discounts
Most of these sites are junky or have a ton of popups, but I’ve found coupons here.
CoolSavings requires free registration.
SmartSource - grocery coupons
Online Deals
These sites list bargains and big sale items. The best place is Woot, but it only shows one item per day. Once in a while, it’ll post a new item as soon as one sells out for a certain amount of time (usually 24-hours).
ugenie provides discounts on bundled items.
Discounted Shopping Stores
American Science & Surplus - science bargains
Cheap Tickets - travel
Dawdle: Buy and sell new and used games
Deep Discount DVD for DVDs.
Expedia Travel - travel
Farecompare - travel
Farecast - travel
Kayak - travel
Lowestfare.com - Travel
Priceline - travel
Updated: July 21, 2008
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13 comments
Another nice site with tons of coupons and promotions updated daily is http://www.pocketdeal.com. It also has the DealAlert shopping assistant for both Windows PCs and Pocket PCs, to alert you of new promotions and coupons, organize the my store, create shopping lists, and more.
I am also using the http://www.priceant.com price comparison web site, unlike most other price comparison web sites, it features real-time price comparison for books, music and CDs, movies and DVDs, video games and consumer electronics.
A great pop-up free site that has tons of current deals, discounts, coupon/promo codes and gift ideas is gonicofish.com. Unlike similar sites that just have endless lists to read through, gonicofish.com is extremely easy to navigate to find a store you are looking for and has a lot of cool ideas for finding unique items online.
Also, PriceCheck.co.za which compares digital cameras, laptops, wines, etc. for the rapidly growing South African market.
Another for the list http://www.spotcost.com
I found this site http://www.ComparisonKey.com it’s a directory that lists all of the major comparison sites and online stores in one place. Here’s the link:ComparisonKey.com
For book price comparison http://www.bookidx.com can also be considered.
Here’s another one you could add, it specialises in IT and consumer electronics - http://www.tom8o.com
Jangle.net is my favorite way to shop Amazon.com.
You can browse by category, sub-category or search. You can also sort the results by price, popularity, percent off, and user ratings.
The best thing about this site is it’s so easy to use! They show you at a glance all the most important stuff about each product.
http://www.jangle.net
Prices4all is my favorite, it’s pretty complete and they have always somehow a shop included with even better deals. The shops they include have promotional codes and sometimes discount vouchers, therefore you can always buy cheaper if you go through them.
This is a very good list, thank you. But I’d like to suggest a comparison site I just found for books. This site is great, it even tells you how much money you’ll save!
a href=”http://www.wecomparebooks.com”>we compare books textbook comparison discount cheap book save money college
I found one shopping comparsion site: http://www.findpricetag.com
One more site: PriceV Comparison
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