The Best Price Comparison Sites

As a frequent on-line shopper for both business and personal items, I always want to make sure I get the best possible price. I also like to make sure that the Web site I buy from is reliable. How do I do that? Of course, I use the Net, specifically price comparison sites where prices, shipping costs and vendor reliability are all available. There are a number of them out there, many of whom you find when do a Google search on a particular item.

I recently read an article in Computer Shopper magazine that compares eight different price comparison sites and rates them. I won't bore you with all the results and some of them rated pretty low and are not worth using. The two top-rated sites were both head and shoulders above the others and deserve your notice.

I've used PriceGrabber.com for several years now and found it extremely reliable and accurate. It has been, and still remains the source I use the most. From there, I can get prices usually from a wide variety of sources for any given product. Surprisingly, to me at least, this site actually came in a close second in the Computer Shopper ratings.

The winner by a slim margin was Shopzilla.com, a site that I must admit I was not aware of until I read the article. Of course, I had to try it and did. It is a good site and I have added it to my repertoire. Now, when I look for something, I use both sites to see if one might have a better price that the other missed. Both sites mostly show the same retailers in their list when looking for the same item, but I have occasionally found some listed on one that are not on the other.

Besides prices, both sites give you the ability to put in your zip code to get shipping costs. By doing that, the sites can also calculate whether or not you will pay sales tax as well as determine your shipping costs. Remember though, shipping costs might be somewhat inaccurate as many places will give you free shipping if you are buying more than a certain dollar amount. With both shopping comparison sites, you can click on the vendor to learn more about shipping.

You can also see the ratings, as voted on by users like ourselves, as to how good (or bad) a particular company might be who is listed. You can also read actual comments by buyers as to why they thought this company was good or bad. More than once I have seen the lowest price on a product being listed by a firm that had many dissatisfied customers. Fortunately, it usually doesn't work out that way.

I recommend that you give both PriceGrabber and Shopzilla a try. PS: I have sometimes used these sites to compare prices on the Net with our local stores. For instance, I found that my studio's next door neighbor the Gourmet Kitchen Store, has very reasonable prices as compared to those on the net and you can't beat the convenience of walking into a store in your home town.