Foreign Perspectives

Shopping comparison sites seem to breed like rabbits, don’t they? Yet, the odd thing is that no two seem to come up with the same prices for products. Or is it odd? Well, in fact the majority of price comparison sites don’t really scan the market quite so intensively as you might reasonably expect which goes to explain some of the differences in prices that come up but, of course, there’s an element of commission payments in there as well.

One site that claims to be different is ShopWiki which aims to scan all the prices available online and offer them to you. In reality it’s probably not going to be able to scan every site as some, regettably, block access to automated price grabbers but it’s a long way forward from those that only offer up results from sites that pay to get placed on the comparison site.

Does it work though? Well, taking a slightly oddball of car seats you’ll find a fairly full page of basic information about them and the regulations that apply to them which is a great deal more than you’d find on the equivalent page of a conventional comparison site. Following that line on down to a Cosco Summit Deluxe and you’ll find one of the best prices around. It’s not the best ticket price around (that’s 5c less) but it comes with free shipping so it is the lowest price that you’ll pay.

Although it picked up the lowest price for the searches I did, that won’t always be the case as sometimes shops offer discounts to some comparison sites that aren’t commonly available but, in principle, this site should offer more consistently low prices than most others on the basis that it’s looking at more shops than the others do.

Don’t always expect an an article to have been written about what you’re searching for though. For instance, whilst you’ll currently get quite a comprehensive writeup about laptops, you drop right down to a straight price comparison if you start hunting around for one of the new netbooks. Having said that, you’re no worse off than you’d be if you went to a normal comparison site for the same stuff but because this site works quite differently, you might find that the prices are better.

Popularity: 5% [?]

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 11:01 am and is filed under Miscellaneous, Shopping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.