Comparison Shopping Online: PriceGrabber vs Calibex vs Shopper.com, etc.

If you're on a budget like we are, you know that the Internet can be your best friend, because it makes comparison shopping a breeze, certainly much more time efficient than going to the mall! However, did you realize that you should also be comparison shopping the comparison shopping engines? Let me tell you what happened to me this evening...

I wanted to buy some computer memory, so I went to PriceGrabber and searched. It came back with the cheapest price from two "featured" merchants, Zipzoomfly and TigerDirect. The cheapest price: $209.

But I'm skeptical by nature, and I don't really like to order from companies I haven't heard of before (Zipzoomfly?) so I went to Calibex where I found that Buy.com had the chepaest price, at $199.94 with free shipping. A good deal, right? No, it turns out that Buy.com doesn't have what I seek in stock and they didn't indicate when it would be available. They also listed TigerDirect and PC Mall as having approx. $210 as the final price.

Next stop was Shopper.com where Buy.com came up again, then MacMall ($199.99) and eCost.com. There's some consistency here, at least.

I tried Shopping.com too, just for comparison, and their best option was Amazon.com, where they listed the price as $218.99 with no tax and free shipping. Go to Amazon itself, though, and it's only $199!

Finally, I ended up ordering the memory from a company I'd done business with before: Macmall where FedEx overnight shipping added $9.99 to the price and the entire memory unit, to be delivered tomorrow, was $207.99.

My conclusion? That it's always better to spend that extra 5-10 minutes comparing comparison sites to ensure that you really do get the best deal.