Purchasing electronics online has never been easier. Finding the right product for the right price isn’t always so easy. Last week covered some of the electronics retailers with storefronts if you are into window shopping. Today, we’ll begin a series of blogs covering a few of the endless number of Web sites for use in comparing and purchasing electronics online. I’ve tried to choose some of the better ones, though I’m sure I’ve left one or two off the list. Feel free to leave a comment at the end of these blogs with your favorite electronics retailers Web sites.
We’ll cover comparison sites today and closeout and coupon sites over the next couple of days.
Comparison sites
Comparison sites allow you to see prices from numerous online retailers at once. Most of the comparison sites host user reviews of both products and retailers to help you in your decision. Some of the comparison sites also have links rebate coupons so you can easily download and print out any rebate forms you may need. I suggest using a combination of the Web sites below in your own product research to find the lowest prices on the best products.
● Pricewatch.com – Pricewatch is a no frills comparison site that offers a wide variety of deals and prices. The bulk of Pricewatch.com is geared towards computer components, but they have steadily been adding listings for other electronic products such as PDAs, digital cameras, and cell phones.
The site is laid out such that you can easily search for specific products or use their product listing to find very specific categories of products. For example, if I want to look for an MP3 player, say the Apple iPod Nano, I could either use the search function or refer to the extensive listing of popular MP3 players. I pasted a screenshot of the MP3 player page on Pricewatch.com.
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● Pricegrabber.com – Pricegrabber.com offers a wide variety of listings on electronics and other products. For popular products, you can usually find numerous user reviews, but the same can’t be said for all products. You can add your own product reviews and earn $5 each for some, and that bonus seems to be enticing more and more users to review products and merchants.
The search function allows you to list specifics of the product you are looking for including price range, manufacturer, and product popularity. Pricegrabber.com offers a number of used and refurbished products, but they are well marked so you won’t be buying one unbeknownst to you.
● Shopzilla.com – Shopzilla.com is composed of the old BizRate.com and because such, it includes lots of professional product reviews. There are also plenty of user reviews to accompany a large listing of products. Shopzilla.com consistently provides the lowest prices for electronic products of all the shopping sites reviewed here.
The search engine on Shopzilla.com is the most intuitive of the shopping sites reviewed here so you won’t have to worry about your search results containing extraneous products. The site layout makes browsing for specific products easy and even sometimes fun.
● Shopping.com – Shopping.com was created out of Epinons.com (see my online purchasing tips for more about Epinions.com) and has become one of the largest e-commerce sites on the Internet. Due to its relationship with Epinons.com, Shopping.com hosts a large amount of user product reviews so you can read what your fellow shoppers think about the products they’ve bought. You can also ensure that you purchase only from trustworthy retailers by following the site’s “trusted merchant” logos.
Shopping.com offers mostly new products, so if you are looking for used or refurbished products (i.e., less expensive), you’ll want to try Pricegrabber.com or Shopzilla.com. The site is quite easy to navigate and you shouldn’t have any trouble finding quality products at low prices.
Other shopping sites