Save money online by using comparison shopping sites

E-commerce is here to stay - there is no doubt about that. Every year the online retail sales numbers keep going higher and higher. Amazon just recently announced its best holiday season ever since the company was formed in 1994.

Consumers are getting more and more comfortable with online shopping and to fill that need more and more merchants are opening stores online. It’s good for consumers to have options but often this can be overwhelming.

When purchasing something online, one usually is looking for answers to these questions:

• Who’s selling product X that I’m interested in?
• Who has the best price?
• Should I trust this merchant to provide a safe and reliable online transaction?

And this brings us to the main point of this blog entry - just how does one go about finding product X online and answer the above questions in a satisfactory manner?

Sometimes maybe you prefer to just go on Amazon.com or buy.com (or any other known big e-tailer) and purchase the product from there without much extra research. You know the company, you have a history with them, you trust them and that is enough maybe.

Other times maybe you’ll just go to Google, search for a product, look at a few of the search results and then just pick one and go with it…but was it the best price? Could you have done better?

This is where the comparison shopping sites come in. What exactly is a comparison shopping site? It’s a site where online merchants submit feeds with the products they carry and the prices they charge and then you, the consumer, can go there, search for a product and see all the merchants that carry that product and how much they charge.

What makes these sites stay in business? Why would they provide this service? To you, the consumer, it’s a great deal but somebody has to pay for this to make this business model sustainable - that’s where the merchant comes in. When online e-etailers submit their product feeds to such comparison shopping sites, they basically enter into agreements with these sites where they will pay x amount of dollars for each visitor that the comparison site sends to their web site. The merchant gets a visitor who’s interested in the product (and hopefully will make a purchase), the comparison site gets paid for the click and the consumer is happy because he found a good deal.

Comparison shopping sites really took off in recent months as consumers are learning more and more about how to research their online purchases. According to traffic stats from January 2007 (the latest I was able to find) these are the top comparison sites:

• Shopping.com
• Shopzilla.com
• Yahoo Shopping
• Nextag.com
• MSN Shopping
• Mezi Media
• Froogle
• Shop.com
• AOL Shopping
• PriceGrabber

These sites differ in the number of products they have in their database (usually directly related to how many merchants signed up to submit their product feeds) and the interface they present to consumers for searching for the best deals.

Personally, I’m a big fan of Pricegrabber, one of the original comparison sites - in my opinion it has one of the best and cleanest interfaces for searching for products. Lately though, for whatever reason, it appears that they are falling behind in the number of merchants/choices they offer for a particular product.

One site that’s different in the group is Froogle - now known as Google Product Search. It’s different because merchants can submit their product feeds for free … yeah, apparently Google has enough money to cover the expense of running such an operation. Because of this, it tends to have the greatest number of merchants/products - it’s just not that well known since it doesn’t appear that Google’s going overboard to promote this service.

So…there you are - lots of choices to explore in your search for the best deals online. If you want to read more on this topic, here’s a good article I found.

Finally, one more thing I should mention, something I just discovered as I was writing this article: apparently a number of sites were started recently that allow you to search, in one shot, across multiple such comparison sites - you might call these the super comparison sites.

One such site is DiscountMore.com - can’t really comment much on it since I didn’t really know about it until now…but I’ll certainly check it out.

Filed under: Money saving tips