Mail & Guardian reporter
The ability to compare prices quickly and easily is one of the attractions of shopping on the Net. In the real world, you have to trudge between shops, trying to remember which had this or that item at the best price.
But online, one store is a click away from another. So putting together a list of prices can be done quickly.
You don’t even need to click round the Web shops yourself. Instead, you can send off an automated programme, aka a shopping bot, to do the job for you.
Visit one of the number of price comparison sites, enter the details of what you’re after – a particular book, CD or video – and the site’s bot will search the Net and come back with a list of prices and links to the shops.
That’s the theory. The reality is not always so smooth. It’s not that price comparison sites aren’t useful. But they still have a long way to go to match the hype.
Firstly, they don’t search all the shops on the Web. Sometimes it’s not their fault. Some online retailers stop shopping bots from accessing their sites. But sometimes price comparison sites will search only the online shops they have deals with. So the online retailer with the lowest price on a particular item might not be searched by the site you’re using.
Some price comparison sites don’t seem to update their databases that often. So you may end up with outdated or misleading information about prices – which vary on a weekly and daily basis online. Some sites also fail to present their information clearly. They don’t take into account postage charges. As a result, their best deal may not add up in the end. Others don’t link properly to the items you want. Once you’ve found a good price, you have to go to the site in question and search all over again. Others have badly designed interfaces that make searching needlessly imprecise.
Shop bots appear to be non- existent in South Africa, although there is a growing local online shopping community including cyber-malls such as Kalahari.net, African Safari, www.safari-iafrica.com. A recent development is www.digitalplanet.co.za where one can buy hardware and software, as well as bidding in auctions of desirable items such as Palm Vs.
South Africans wishing to pick up Internet bargains from other countries also have to be careful about tax liabilities – import duty can add substantially to the bargain price you managed to obtain in Uzbekistan. Then there is the problem of getting the stuff home in the post or paying for a courier. An alternative, of course, is to do your buying from home ahead of an overseas trip, and then arrange for your goodies to be delivered to your hotel. Be warned that even then you may have some tax liabilities.
Most price comparison sites on the Web are American and search mostly United States sites. To see what’s there, try MySimon, Price Scan, Deal Time or Robo- Shopper. Though these search hundreds of online retailers between them, they’re tailored mainly to US users. Other users will need to do extra research, once the best price is found.
For example, you need to find out if the shop in question will actually sell to overseas customers, then you need to work out VAT and duty.
So though a site like Killer App, a price comparison site devoted to PCs, peripherals and components, may turn up some mouth- watering prices, you can find that they don’t translate into money-saving deals. And you can waste a lot of time in the process.
European Net shoppers could try something like Deal Pilot (formerly known as Acses), a global price comparison site. At the moment it lets you search book retailers in different countries – US, United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, and so on – and plans to expand the service to videos and music. But Deal Pilot is a little glitchy at times – not always that well updated, though its interface is well designed and thankfully doesn’t assume you’re from the US.
Brits would be better off with the home- grown price comparison sites. These don’t search a large number of retailers and are restricted mainly to music, video, books and computer games. But they are improving week by week. The best of the bunch are BargainFinder (which you’ll find on the useful shopping directory site Shop Guide or ShopGenie (which has its own site at www.shopgenie.com, though you can also find it on another useful directory, Enterprise City.
Also worth a look is Best Deals at My Taxi, though it isn’t as reliable or user- friendly. It’s actually a European version of the US site Bottom Dollar. For deals on computers and related products, there are several specialist sites worth trying – Price Watch, Computer Prices and PC Index.
Both ShopGenie and BargainFinder make it clear which retail sites they search in each category. Though they don’t search that many, the big names are here and new sites seem to be added fairly regularly. Both make it easy to figure out the real price (all include details of shipping costs).
ShopGenie possibly has the edge in that it covers more categories. Along with books, music, videos and games, it also covers computers and software. And its search interface enables you to be a little more precise about what you’re after. But there’s not much to choose between them. Both are a little unpredictable.
Both seem to find deals on sites the other has missed. Given this, there seems likely to be an opportunity in the future for a British meta-shopping bot: a site that searches all the other price comparison sites. There is such a site in the US, Priceman – though at the moment it is offline, thanks to legal action from the biggest price comparison site, MySimon.
In the meantime, when it comes to price comparisons, be sceptical. Don’t put all your trust in one site. Try several, if you can. Once you’ve done that, if you’re really keen on getting the best price, you can go on to search other sites manually. But don’t get too hung up on it.
There’s a lot of hype about how the Net can save money. But the cheapest deal isn’t always the best. If you’ve used an online retailer and the service has been quick and efficient, don’t give up on it for the sake of an extra rand off from some site you’ve never heard of.
Remember, Net shopping is also about saving time. Spending an hour clicking around looking for a way of saving a rand or two on the new Chemical Brothers CD is not really a productive use of your time. It’s also not that much fun.