Your Own Personal Online Shopper

by: Jim Edwards
© Jim Edwards - All Rights reservedhttp://www.thenetreporter.com-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-Imagine you find yourself in the market to buy a new digitalcamera and, before you part with your money, you want tocomparison shop for the best price online. If you do a search for "digital camera" on Google.com, theWeb's top search engine, you'll get back over 7 million pageresults.Refine your search to a specific model, such as the HPPhotosmart 935, and you get back 137,000 page results. Nowdo a search on BestBuy.com, CircuitCity.com, and Amazon.comand you'll only find it listed one time, and on that site itcosts $60 more than I paid for it at Target. Even though the web makes it easy to search out the productswe want to buy, sometimes that mountain of information makesit almost impossible to find the best deal. To solve this problem there are "personal online shoppers"which help you seek, find, and comparison shop multipleoffers for just about any product you want to buy, online oroffline.An online personal shopper-type service enables you to logon to a single site, enter the product details you want tosearch, and then have the website give you back a list ofprices and places where you can purchase the item. The personal shopping assistant sites that rate the bestdon't accept commissions for the sale of items through theirservices because getting paid based on what the customerbuys would eliminate unbiased product comparisons. The best services make their money by selling targetedadvertising to merchants and only displaying products intheir search results based on price and features.~ MySimon.com ~MySimon.com ranks as one of the oldest personal shoppingassistants on the Internet. Highlights of the service include an extensive homepagedirectory to help you choose the correct product category tosearch and a database of millions of products. On the negative, MySimon.com does manipulate their merchantlistings pages based on how much money the advertiser paysto show up in the results.~ PriceScan.com ~Pricescan.com does not accept money from advertisers tomanipulate their search results, though they will showtargeted advertising on the search results pages. A very nice feature on this site involves the ability toenter features you want in a particular item (such as acomputer) and then search all makes, models, andmanufacturers matching those features. You'll find this especially valuable when comparing thingslike computers, which often carry many different variablesand configurations.~ Froogle.com ~Operated by Internet giant, Google.com, Froogle.com allowsyou to search for specific items you want to buy and thensort them by price. You can also specify a price range you're willing to pay forthe item and Froogle will only search for and display thoseitems that fall within the range. Froogle also clearly draws a line (literally) betweenunbiased search results on the left side of the page andadvertisers on the right. In the testing for this article, Froogle consistentlyreturned the highest quantity and most relevant searchresults for specific product names entered.