One of the great things about shopping on Amazon is that you can read through dozens, if not hundreds of user reviews. While expert and editorial reviews can give you a sense of whether an item is worth the sale price, user reviews will let you know whether you should expect it to fall apart the moment you unpack the box.
But who has time to sift through hundreds of reviews when you just want someone to tell you whether you should buy this digital camera or that one? That's where Pluribo comes in. This Firefox add-on will read through the user reviews in certain product categories and present you with a concise summary.
The plugin uses some artificial intelligence so you don't wind up with short, choppy, and unreadable reviews. Don't expect Shakespeare, but Pluribo will give you enough information that you might not need to read the individual reviews.
Right now, Pluribo doesn't work with products in every category. For example, digitial cameras seem to be covered, but video cameras aren't.
While eBay is busy annoying its power sellers by raising fees and changing its policy on digital goods, a bunch of new companies are popping up and hoping to grab a little piece of the online sales pie that eBay has been hogging. Fididel is a new site that aims to differentiate itself from other auction/retail sites by letting buyers and sellers negotiate prices in real-time.
At first glance, Fididel looks pretty much like every other online store you've ever seen. You can search for items by keyword or you can browse through a list of categories. but when you click the "fididel!" button, things get a bit funky. Instead of a bid or checkout page, you get taken to a chat window. And we're using the word chat loosely here, because there's actually only a predefined list of comments that you can leave. While this probably prevents buyers from swearing or making inappropriate comments to sellers, it also constrains the terms of your haggling session a bit.
But the important thing is that you can find an item listed for $100, offer $50, and meet somewhere in the middle. The whole process can be much quicker than waiting for an eBay auction to end. of course, the seller needs to be online in order for you to have a real-time negotiation session. But if you don't sit in front of your computer all day, you can hire another Fididel member to do your negotiating for you for a commission fee.
How often have you been out walking your dog when it suddenly occurs to you that you forgot to order the latest Lemony Snicket book? Well, now you can place your order without going to a store or waiting until you home and plop yourself back in front of a computer for the rest of the day. Just pull out your cellphone and send a text message with an item name to AMAZON (262966) thanks to a new Amazon service called TextBuyIt.
While we don't think anyone expects you to do all of your shopping from your phone (especially if you don't have an unlimited data plan), you can search for items by keyword, or ISBN UPC code. That means you can easily check prices on items while you're in a bricks and mortar store. Want to see if that computer, blender, or video game on the shelf is reasonably priced? Just check it out with Amazon.
Have your eye on the Macbook Air, but don't want to pull the trigger and buy one until Steve Jobs drops the price by a few hundred bucks? You could keep hitting refresh on the Apple Store page from now until eternity. Or you could have Price!pinx send you an email when the price changes.
Here's how it works. You drag a Price!pinx bookmarklet to your browser toolbar. Then whenever you visit a product page on any web-based store, you just highlight the price of the item you're interested in and hit the bookmarklet. The Price!pinx page will pop up and if you enter your email address the service will send you a message as soon as the price changes.
You can also register for a free account to manage all of your notifications in one place. But there's no registration required to set up a basic alert.
You may already know that you'll probably save money by ordering prints of your digital photos online or at the local drug store than by printing them yourself. They don't call printer ink black gold for nothing. But all online photo printing services are not created equal.
PrintRates lets you find the best deals meeting your criteria. You can select what size prints you're looking for, how many prints you need, and how quickly you'd like them shipped. The site compares rates for more than 50 different services in the US and UK. There are also user-submitted reviews which can come in handy when making your decision if the cheapest site is one you've never heard of before.
Looking for a few good bargains on tech toys and consumer electronics this holiday season, but didn't feel like waking up at 4am this morning to fight with fellow shoppers at Best Buy or Circuit City? It turns out you can get some pretty good bargains year round, if you know where to check.
Or if you're looking for information, and not just bargains, check out Retrovo. You can use Retrovo just to find the lowest prices on particular products. But if you want to find the digital camera that has the most bang for the buck, Retrevo has a new "value map" feature that lets you know which items have the best specs for the price. You can search all kinds of categories for electronics like PDAs, digital cameras, TVs and cellphones. And if you want the info you can't find on the back of the box, Retrevo will also show you complete product manuals.
Is there a better way to end a long week than to sit down in front of the screen and do a little shopping? For some, maybe, but how about when you get good deals?
Shopping online. We all do it out of convenience and the fact that we are able to surf around for the best deals from the comfort of our own homes. RetailMeNot is a website that compiles coupons from major online retailers and makes them available to anyone who wants them. They are the coupons that the stores don't tell you about. We covered this site way back in 2006, but since then they have completely redesigned their service.
The RetailMeNot website is simple to use, enter the shopping site you want to check coupons for and you will be presented with a generous list of coupon codes and what their deals consist of. Then use the coupons upon checkout from said stores. RetailMeNot also lets users surf around by popular stores, popular coupons and keywords that they have in their database.
RetailMeNot is a quick and easy way to make sure you are getting the best deal online. Some of the deals might have limited time access, and their success rates are noted under stats for each coupon.
You're not supposed to be able to patent anything that's obvious. That's a gross oversimplification of complex US patent law, but basically we've always wondered how Amazon got away with patenting a "one-click" shopping button. Sure, nobody else can use the exact same code you did to create a one-click checkout button. But seriously, did the US Patent Office think that the idea to click a "buy now" button was original?
While we just scratched our head and laughed, blogger Peter Calveley went and did something about it. He filed a re-examination request last year. And now that the patent office has taken another look at the one-click patent they've rejected a large number of claims made by Amazon. In other words, while Amazon has a chance to respond, there's a good chance this patent will be revoked.
Everyone wants the best price possible when buying goods and services, and with so many shopping comparison sites online we are sure to get goods that are priced to our satisfaction. But are they really showing us all the deals out there?
Services like MySimon, Bizrate and NexTag aside, Tjoos does not play favorites to stores that only have affiliate programs where these sites earn a commission by referring visits. Some of these comparison shopping websites may indeed not show lower priced merchandise in favor of only showing goods that are part of affiliate programs.
Users are still shown good deals, however, not all the good deals that might be available in the marketplace. For instance, a search on Bizrate for a 'Canon digital camera' brought up affiliate results for stores such as eBay and Dell among others (mouse over product links to see affiliate URL paths). Tjoos scans the web and searches out the best deals, volume discount options, coupons and discounts from all over, comparing the actual prices and not just the advertised prices. The website is still a work in progress with contact lenses the only item listed under products. However, the coupons section is jam packed with online retailers listed in alphabetical order and offering such deals as 15% at Adobe, Unlimited DVD rentals at Blockbuster, $30 off at CompUSA, 10 free songs at Napster and 40% off shoes at Zappos.com.
If it's an unbiased deal you are after, Tjoos is a site you should add to your list of discount hunting locations.
Back in the day (meaning, only about five years ago), when you needed the customer service department of a company to solve a problem, you simply picked up the phone and talked to a real, live person. That soon gave way to working your way through phone trees more complicated than the schematics of the International Space Station. Gradually, we found ourselves shouting, ""Return a package....reeeee-turn a paaaaack-age!" to disembodied robotic voices that ask why we're calling.
Sick of the process? We are too, so the idea that Wal-Mart would do away with all that filled us with child-like glee. Until we realized what they had in mind.
Bookseller Barnes & Noble has updates its website, adding a bit of Web 2.0 goodness including podcasts, a tag cloud, and multimedia.
According to the Associated Pres, Barnes & Noble makes about 10% of its sales through the web. Probably the most noticeable (and most distracting) change is a huge section at the top of the page where new releases scroll past. You can hover your mouse over each book for more information.
While we're glad to see sites take advantage of new technologies to improve the shopping experience, we're not quite convinced Barnes & Noble's redesign fits the bill. The tag cloud might be useful if it weren't all the way at the bottom of the page where you'll only find it if you're looking for it. And as Read/WriteWeb points out, there are a few really useful features that are missing like recommendations and RSS feeds, both things that Amazon offers.
eBay is getting a facelift. And while it's probably long overdue, we're not quite sure if its necessary.
While pretty much every new website you see these days use newfangled tools like AJAX and Flash animation to provide a desktop-like experience without the need to reload a webpage, a handful of popular sites have continued to get by with a web 1.0 interface. Craigslist and eBay are probably the first two that come to mind. After all, if you're shopping for used goods and bargains, a flashy website might just make you feel like the seller is trying to hide something.
That said, there's one thing that has always made items more attractive on eBay and Craigslist: pictures. And the new eBay design does a good job of highlighting pictures. You can still use the traditional list view with a tiny thumbnail. But for selected categories, you can also choose a "Picture Gallery" or "Snapshot View."
In Picture Gallery, you see large thumbnails with item information like title, price, and time remaining underneath. The Snapshot View shows you just a screen filled with images. Click on one and a window will pop up with a larger photo and more info about the item. For items where looks matter more than specs, shopping by photo could definitely be more productive than shopping by title.
The new views aren't available for all users for every category yet, but the company plans to roll them out for everyone by the end of the year. Some categories will also allow you to search by size, brand or color.
Oh the humanity! It's a bird, it's a plane! In the course of human history, there have been many sentences that demanded an exclamation point. But very rarely, if ever have we been able to issue three completely appropriate exclamation points in one sentence: Woot! and Yahoo! have announced a partnership!
If you don't get it yet, the exclamation points are actually part of both company's names. Well, kind of. Woot includes one in its logo, but not in most references to the company name. As for the last exclamation point, that's just there to express our own excitement.
Woot, for the uninitiated, is a website that offers one item for sale each day, usually at an extremely deep discount. There's a limited supply of each item, and if it sells out, you're out of luck until the next day when something else goes on sale. Occasionally the site goes crazy and has a Woot Off where as soon as one item sells out another is made available until the company decides it's over.
Apparently Yahoo! has approached Woot about offering a daily Woot item through Yahoo! Shopping. Starting at midnight tonight, there will be a new Woot item available from the front page of Yahoo! Shopping every day. It will be a separate item from the one sold that day at Woot.com. The upshot for Woot is that more customers will learn about the company (and buy products from it). And Yahoo! gets a little geek cred, and a daily sale item for its front page.
Buy.com is jumping on the social network bandwagon with their launch of Garage Sale.
This new shopping service allows users to steer around auctions and sell items directly from a social profile page. Could it steal page views from eBay? It sure could. Who would you buy from first, a friend or stranger? Garage Sale handles the transactions including credit card billing, and PayPal depositing or payment by cheque.
Buy.com's Garage Sale is currently only available for Facebook users, and will be rolled out on other social networks in the future. Buy.com does take a 5% per transaction commission, thankfully there are no other fees.
If you still like the traditional Garage Sale method, check out ZipGarage.
ZipGarage is a new service that lets you list and find garage sales in your area. While the service is rather robust, there's not a lot to look at just yet. We entered about a dozen zip codes and couldn't find a single garage sale within 10 miles of any of them.
In other words, the service isn't very useful just yet. Luckily ZipGarage offers the widget you see above that shows locations of various sales. If the site catches on, it could be the Craigslist of garage sales. It offers users a simple tool for listing times, locations, and items for sale.
You can also upload photos and tag portions of them with descriptions. Say you've got a table, chairs, and dinner plates for sale. Rather than take pictures of each item separately, photograph the whole set and tag parts of the image with descriptions of each item for sale.
