Pull Up a Chair and Shop Smart

Online shopping is a great way to get the best bargains without having to brave foul weather or battle crowds. However, with worldwide inventory at your fingertips, finding what you want can be a daunting task. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Savvy online shoppers know how to cut through the clutter to get the best item at the best price and also benefit from the insights of other online consumers.

Let Others Take Care of the Mousework

Whether you’re looking for a difficult-to-find book or that killer pair of sneakers, you don’t have to spend hours searching the Web and clicking back and forth between sites to make comparisons. Help is at hand when you use a Web bot. Short for “robot,” a bot is a search engine that gathers prices for products from a variety of vendors and ranks them for you. Bots can shop the Web for the best deals at a speed and on a scale that would be impossible for anyone but Superman or Wonder Woman. There are many sites that offer this kind of shopping service, and they offer different search options and levels of service.

BizRate.com is one example of a bot. Founded in 1996 as a consumer research business, BizRate.com not only finds the lowest prices, it also provides you with merchant ratings based on consumer feedback. BizRate.com gives you spot checks of the top deals and allows you to make side-by-side comparisons with similar products.

If you’re looking for books, there’s one excellent clearinghouse. Bookfinder.com is a dynamic search engine that finds the best buys from among 40 million new, used, rare, and out-of-print books for sale around the world. For example, a recent search for a favorite cookbook turned up twenty-eight copies.

PriceGrabber.com also searches for product information and great deals. In addition to its “user” reviews, the site includes “expert” opinions written by product reviewers. PriceScan.com is a similar site that allows you to sort by price from online and offline retailers.

With Shopping.com you get the search features of a bot combined with useful consumer reviews. You can also read reviews of products as well as reviews of their retailers, and Shopping.com also features extensive product specifications. For example, when doing research about cameras, you can get details such as weight, compression modes, and focal length.

With all the advantages bots offer, there is but one caveat online shoppers need to be aware of – some merchandisers pay bots to put their products at the top of the list.