If you're bored -- go shopping.
moneycentral.msn.com
Shopping search engines hunt down best prices
By Deborah Michel
The one cordless phone in the house, my lifeline to the outside world, is about to go on the fritz. My twin daughters have finally gone down for their nap, which gives me about an hour. I turn to the Internet.
I?ve heard wonderful things about Jango from my savvy Silicon Valley friends. It?s a price comparison tool that searches the Internet for a wide variety of products. You used to have to download Jango but it was recently acquired by Excite, renamed (rather dowdily, I think) Excite Shopping Search, and is now the jewel in the Excite Shopping Channel crown.
Jango generates a long list of possibilities for me (228, to be exact), culled from various e-tail sites (for the novice Net shopper, that?s ?electronic retail?), sorted by brand and price, with an inviting little ?Buy!? button next to each one. Most are 10% to 40% off the suggested retail price. So I pick the model I want, choose the site offering the lowest price, click on the button and finish the newspaper before my children awake.
Well, not exactly. But two days and seven hours online later, I have ordered a new phone. It will take seven to 10 days to arrive. Throughout the process I keep asking myself, ?Why not just give up and drive the 25 minutes to Office Depot tomorrow and take whatever they have in the right price range?? In the end, however, I?m glad I didn?t, and I?m pleased to finally know my way around the Excite Shopping Channel, which, like pretty much everything related to computers, takes forever the first time but is a breeze thereafter.
Bargain hunting means surfing several sites
Finding the best bargains online doesn?t require knowing the one site that offers the lowest prices on everything, mainly because it doesn?t exist, and if it did, it would probably change constantly. Better to know how to find the best price among lots of sites for the particular item you want. That?s why I like the Excite Shopping Channel.
One of the nice things about an actual store, of course, is that you can look at models and ask salespeople questions. My search took so long because I didn?t know enough about what I wanted. I didn?t even have a brand preference. That shouldn?t deter you. The Internet offers plenty of ways to educate yourself, such as the one I discovered through the ESC?s link to the utterly delightful Consumer World, a site that?s basically an index of other sites with consumer product information and reviews. I went straight to the name I knew, Consumer Reports, but actually found the product information at E-Town more helpful, fun and up-to-date -- not to mention free, which Consumer Reports wasn?t (you have to join for $24 a year).
Then I went to CompareNet (another ESC link). It asks you a number of questions about which features matter to you, then comes up with possibilities that match your requirements and even generates nifty little charts complete with brand-names, model numbers, and manufacturers? suggested list prices. A bit of advice: To hell with trees, print out these pages. I wasted untold time by not doing it the first time.
CompareNet recommended only one site for purchasing the cordless of my choice -- NetMarket. This made me nervous. Had any price comparisons actually been done or was NetMarket merely an advertiser? Back to Jango I went, armed now with an exact model number (Uniden EX905, manufacturer?s suggested list price, $249.95). I got the comfort of a list of different sites where I could buy the same phone for a variety of prices ($110-$140), but as it happened, NetMarket did offer the lowest price, at $95. (I wouldn?t bother to actually join NetMarket -- you get the same low prices either way.) I wouldn?t consider the extra time spent double-checking a waste, and would do it every time.
I even called Circuit City and Office Depot just out of curiosity. Neither had the particular phone I?d decided on, but they did have more expensive models and cheaper ones without the features I wanted. To be fair, however, the prices were fairly comparable prices to those found online. In short, you can probably find as good a bargain in discount stores, but there?s more choice and less driving online.
Did I save any money? Yes (my husband rolls his eyes) -- and no. I spent the $100 or so I?d planned on but only because, encouraged by the great prices online, I upgraded to a much better phone than I?d intended Happy shopping |
