5 Best Online Comparison Shopping Tools April 12

Filed under Consumer Issues, Internet Tools by Elizabeth | 7 comments

I am not one of those people who likes shopping. (Well, I love grocery shopping, but that’s about it). Sometimes I’m in the mood to browse, but usually when I shop I’ve already figured out exactly what I want and so I’m just searching for the best price. For this reason, I love shopping on the Internet. There are now a large number of online comparison shopping tools that will search and find the best price for you. I decided to test them out against eachother to search for three products that I’m currently considering purchasing. The products are: Brooks Women’s Adrenaline Running Shoes (GTS 7), Canon Powershot SD800 Digital Camera, and SimpleTech Simple External Hard Drive 250GB.

Here are the 16 comparison shopping tools I used (in no particular order): mySimon, PriceGrabber, Froogle, Bizrate, Yahoo Shopping, Shopzilla, Bottomdollar, DealTime, Shopping.com, NexTag, Amazon, Become.com, MSN Shopping, Overstock, Pricewatch, and PriceSCAN.

(Note that Amazon.com and Overstock.com are not actually comparison shopping tools. But, Amazon carries a lot of vendors and Overstock sometimes has good deals. Plus it’s a good baseline for comparison since so many people use these sites regularly.)

Here are the prices that were returned for each product. If you’re just interested in the overall results, see the end of the post.

SimpleTech SimpleDrive 250 GB Externa lHard Drive
mySimon 95.99
PriceGrabber 95.99
Froogle 99.54
Bizrate 99.99
Yahoo Shopping 99.99
Shopzilla 99.99
Bottomdollar 101.99
DealTime 103
Shopping.com 103
NexTag 108
Amazon 110.31
Become.com 127.49
MSN Shopping 132.99
Overstock 148.99
Pricewatch: No results
PriceSCAN: No results

Canon Powershot SD800 Digital Camera
MSN Shopping 285 from a non-reputable seller 320 from rated sellers
PriceSCAN 323
Become.com 280 (non rated) 329 rated
NexTag 332 (trusted seller)
Shopzilla 332 (smart choice seller)
mySimon 332
Bizrate 332 (smartchoice seller)
PriceGrabber 332
Bottomdollar 332
Yahoo Shopping 282 (poorly rated seller) 336 well rated seller
Shopping.com 338
Pricewatch 343
Amazon 344
DealTime 338 (at the top, but actually 349.7 when I clicked through to the website)
Overstock: No results
Froogle: Not worth the time to sort through

Brooks Women’s Adrenaline Running Shoes (GTS 7)
Amazon 85.49
Bizrate 85.49
Shopzilla 85.49 (had to sort)
Yahoo Shopping 67.95 (unrated seller) 85.49 next best
DealTime 89.99
Become.com 89.99
NexTag 89.99
Shopping.com 94.99
MSN Shopping $94.99
PriceGrabber 94.95
Bottomdollar 94.95
Froogle: Not worth the time to sort through
Overstock:
Pricewatch: No results
PriceSCAN: No results
mySimon: No results

As you can see some of the sites produced very different results (particularly for the external hard drive). Based on this tedious comparison shopping experience here were a few things I noted about comparison shopping online:

  1. Froogle. I’m generally a huge fan of Google products and have used Froogle many times in the past. But honestly, when comparing it to the other search engines, it pales in comparison. It was a big big disappointment. The truth is that it brings in too many products and it takes far too long to sort through them. For instance, when I was looking at the camera it kept giving me prices for the camera case and an underwater camera case. It just wasn’t worth the time to sort through everything it pulled up.
  2. Many of the shopping comparison engines list “featured sellers” first. You have to sort by price to get all of the sellers.
  3. Watch out for something that is too cheap. When you find a price that is much cheaper than what everyone else is offering, be suspicious. Many of the cheaper cameras were refurbished or a non-US model. (This was listed in small print and hard to find on their websites)
  4. Look for trusted sellers. Several of the comparison sites have user ratings for the sellers. Be careful when buying from sellers that are unrated or rated poorly. I recommend spending a few more dollars to get it from a seller that has proven itself in the past.
  5. Look at shipping costs. Some of the better comparison sites list shipping prices and a total price for you.


5 Best Online Comparison Shopping Tools
After all was said and done here were my 5 favorite sites that I will use again and again. I don’t think I can fairly rank them against each other, so the top 5 in no particular order:

Please note that these prices were as of April 5, 2007 when I did the initial research for this post. I make no promises about which search engines will give you the best price and hold no responsibility for fluctuations in product pricing.

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