Compare the shopping comparison sites to find a great deal
It makes sense to shop around when making any sort of purchase, and the internet is a fantastic place to start. There are so many websites around these days offering everything from books and DVD's to clothes, mobile phones, groceries and a whole load more. In fact, you can buy almost anything you can think of online if you try hard enough. But the great thing about online shopping is that it is easy to quickly compare prices from many different suppliers, without having to trudge from shop to shop to check the price at each individual retailer. You don't even have to manually go to the website for each and every shop either, as there are comparison services available that allow you to instantly compare prices at many different websites, thereby saving you a fair amount of time and helping you cut costs on your everyday spending.
Make Use Of Shopbots
Shopbots (also known as comparison shopping agents, or "shopping robots") are intelligent software applications that are designed to help consumers find the lowest possible prices for products and services online. Price comparison websites use shopbots to compare prices across a large number of online stores, based on particular keywords typed in by the user. They work in various ways, some gathering data directly from merchant sites (either by crawling the web or some form of manual process), some collecting data from a feed provided by the merchants, and some using crowdsourcing, which allow the users of the comparison sites to provide up to date feedback on prices. In reality however, most price comparison websites use a combination of all of these techniques to come up with their data.
What can you compare?
Comparison shopping sites can compare prices on a vast number of different products. There are both specialist web sites for specific types of merchandise, as well as more generalised comparison websites that collect data from hundreds of different sources about thousands of different products. In general, if there is a specialist comparison site available for the particular type of product you are searching for, it is best to check that website first as it is more likely to be optimised for products in that niche, and know where to look in order to find the best prices. However, it is important to remember to check as many sites as you can, as the first price you find will certainly not always be the lowest, and you can not always trust the price shown by comparison sites, so if you can, it is wise to go direct to a few merchants too.