Top 7 Shopping Comparison Sites I Use

This coming Christmas may be renamed e-Christmas, because holiday shopping starts as early as August now and more and more people are using their credit cards online to order gifts for the ones they love.

If you’re shopping online without doing any comparison before you checkout, you’re missing the power of the internet. Having instant access to a multitude of merchants offering the same exact thing gives rise to opportunistic shopping deals all the time. No reason why you shouldn’t enjoy some leverage when going to online stores for your purchases.

Where you go to look for better pricing or offers depends on what type of product you’re buying of course, but here are the Top 7 Shopping Comparison Sites I frequest the most:

• www.froogle.com — renamed Google Product Search (Froogle is a better name, isn’t it?), this unbias search lets you sort and find what you’re looking for the Google way. Merchants don’t pay to get included, so there’s no bias, bidding behind the scenes or anything other than Google’s searching power specific to things that are sold online.

• www.shopping.com — the biggie of the shopping comparison sites, now owned by eBay

• www.shopzilla.com — the new and improved BizRate, this is shopping.com’s competitor

• shopping.yahoo.com — Yahoo! Shopping is supposedly one of the gorillas in shopping search

• www.fatwallet.com — OK, OK, so this is not a price comparison site, but usually you can do a quick search for the model or product you’re looking for and you’ll find discussion forum threads posting coupons and “advanced-level” bargain tactics with “Stackable” coupons (you can use more than one together) and other really good tips for the product you’re trying to buy.

• www.slickdeals.net — Anoter fatwallet-type site, this is a great secondary source of deals – use the search feature when you’re in a task-oriented shopping mode to find deals for what you’re looking for.

• www.google.com — there are tons of coupon sites out there, but one of the best ways to find a great coupon code or promo code to use during checkout is to Google it! “store_name_here COUPON CODE” or “store_name_here PROMOTION CODE” or use other phrases like “printable coupon” or “discount code” or just “code” to start looking.