March 21, 2007

Your Own Personal Online Shopper

- by Jim Edwards

Imagine you find yourself in the market to buy a new digital camera
and, before you part with your money, you want to comparison shop
for the best price online.

If you do a search for "digital camera" on Google.com, the Web’s top
search engine, you’ll get back over 7 million page results.

Refine your search to a specific model, such as the HP Photosmart
935, and you get back 137,000 page results. Now do a search on
BestBuy.com, CircuitCity.com, and Amazon.com and you’ll only find it
listed one time, and on that site it costs $60 more than I paid for
it at Target.

Even though the web makes it easy to search out the products we want
to buy, sometimes that mountain of information makes it almost
impossible to find the best deal.

To solve this problem there are "personal online shoppers" which
help you seek, find, and comparison shop multiple offers for just
about any product you want to buy, online or offline.

An online personal shopper-type service enables you to log on to a
single site, enter the product details you want to search, and then
have the website give you back a list of prices and places where you
can purchase the item.

The personal shopping assistant sites that rate the best don’t
accept commissions for the sale of items through their services
because getting paid based on what the customer buys would eliminate
unbiased product comparisons.

The best services make their money by selling targeted advertising
to merchants and only displaying products in their search results
based on price and features.

~ MySimon.com ~

MySimon.com ranks as one of the oldest personal shopping assistants
on the Internet.

Highlights of the service include an extensive homepage directory to
help you choose the correct product category to search and a
database of millions of products.

On the negative, MySimon.com does manipulate their merchant listings
pages based on how much money the advertiser pays to show up in the
results.

~ PriceScan.com ~

Pricescan.com does not accept money from advertisers to manipulate
their search results, though they will show targeted advertising on
the search results pages.

A very nice feature on this site involves the ability to enter
features you want in a particular item (such as a computer) and then
search all makes, models, and manufacturers matching those features.

You’ll find this especially valuable when comparing things like
computers, which often carry many different variables and
configurations.

~ Froogle.com ~

Operated by Internet giant, Google.com, Froogle.com allows you to
search for specific items you want to buy and then sort them by
price.

You can also specify a price range you’re willing to pay for the
item and Froogle will only search for and display those items that
fall within the range.

Froogle also clearly draws a line (literally) between unbiased
search results on the left side of the page and advertisers on the
right.

In the testing for this article, Froogle consistently returned the
highest quantity and most relevant search results for specific
product names entered.

–Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the co-author
of an amazing new ebook that will teach you how to use fr^e articles
to quickly drive thousands of targeted visitors to your website or
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