My Blog, Your Money

With the rise of the World Wide Web, there are now more resources than ever at your fingertips to help save you some money. Say you’re in the market for a camera. In pre-WWW days, if you wanted a deal, you’d have to scour store ads and look out for sales. Now, all you have to do is get on your computer and point your browser to a price comparison service. Some of my favorites are:

• PriceGrabber – This is the one I use the most. It has a clean interface and sections for every product category imaginable. For the environmentally conscious, there’s a ShopGreen section which emphasizes the greener side of shopping and even donates 5% of its profits to a green charity of your choosing.
• Google Product Search (formerly known as Froogle) – The search king’s take on a pricing engine.
• Shopping.com
• NexTag.com

There are many more sites out there and the good thing is that they’re all free. So go ahead and try them all to find what works best for you. You don’t have stick with just using one either. Whenever I am looking to make a purchase, I usually use a combination of pricing sites to vet my results and ensure that I get the best deal possible.

One thing to look out for though is the credibility of the seller. Similar to eBay, many of the pricing engines feature a mechanism to rate the merchant and provide feedback. It’s a good way to avoid dealing with shady sites that might be looking to scam you out of your hard-earned cash. A great site I always use when I’m checking out an unfamiliar online store is ResellerRatings.com which is quite possibly the most comprehensive merchant rating site on the Web.