ProBargainHunter.com

This week I am reviewing shopper.cnet.com and is the second price comparison site being reviewed by me. This review will be similar to the review of Pricegrabber.com to make it fair.

The homepage is clean with nice categorized menu options. Major part of the top of the main page content is for popular products, which lists three products in each of the popular product categories. Biggest strength for Shopper.cnet.com is the editorial product reviews by its staff and these reviews also help in deciding the popular products.

We start with first evaluating the search functionality. I am using the same 6 search terms as used for Pricegrabber. Pricegrabber performed well for the first 5 while not for the 6th. Here is now Shopper performed:

1. Canon Powershot (perfect)
2. Elph (Perfect, expected various cameras)
3. 2077B001 (A manufacturer product number and this showed the proper product)
4. Digital Recorder (purposefully skipped the word ‘Voice’ in-between and the results were perfect)
5. Recorder (perfect)
6. Nikon Powershot (Yes, purposefully goofed up, I expected all Nikon products as well as Canon powershot cameras to be listed. But very impressively, it suggested “Canon Powershot” and also showed the results for Canon Powershot. Impressive in comparison to Pricegrabber)

Being Able to Choose a Product Based on Various Technical Details and Features of the Product

The test: Same as done for Pricegrabber, trying to find a digital SLR.

• The search function does not allow changing various parameters to narrow the results. So, we need to go to the digital cameras section of the site to get started. (942 items)
• There is no way to set custom price ranges, so I pick a preset range, $500 - $1200 (78 items)
• Picked 8MP and up (preset option, 46 items)
• Impressive that D80 is already the top item in the result, followed by Canon EOS 40D and then Nikon 40 (sorted by popularity by default)
• Wanted to sort by product rating to find the “good” camera (not to just depend on product popularity), but sorting by rating is not possible. However all items listed show the rating in an obvious styling.
• So next option is to sort lowest to highest price, but this does not really help as a lot of undesired cameras show up on the top.
• Thus in conclusion, from this point onwards, we have to manually keep track of ratings and price to pick our right choice. The cheap and best desired item D40x is located in the third position right now (sorted by price low to high).

Analyze the Reliability of the Product Based on the Product Reviews

Cnet is simply a leader in product reviews and there could be no doubt on that. Checking the reviews of the D40x, really good and in very great depth.

Find the Seller with Cheapest Price

Here I try to check the lowest price of five different (top) products listed in the home page (popular products) under five different categories.
The results were just similar to Pricegrabber, all the five products carried the approx lowest price possible with the same confusion of whether the store is reputed.

Analyze the Reliability of the Seller

Shopper.cnet.com features a very detailed product rating formula, which is detailed here: http://shopper.cnet.com/4002-5_9-5100969.html There is no way to see how many ratings have been recorded or read store reviews, but there is a very interesting “Store Profile” page, which summarizes every aspect of the store, which makes the job very easy. It even lists contact details etc. However there is one important observation here, very few stores have a rating less than 5 (there are several stores with no ratings yet). At the minimum, there is no reputed store which is rated less than a crappy store, just because most stores are rated at 5 :-)

While repeatedly browsing the website for this review, I found that Shopper.cnet.com partners with Pricegrabber to increase the number of stores listed! Here is their home page: http://cnet.pgpartner.com/. Seems like CNET has some merchants directly associated with them, while some merchants come through pricegrabber.

In conclusion, Shopper.cnet.com seems pretty much like PriceGrabber however with some differences like - search function is slightly better, short listing products is a bit difficult. However in overall it all tallies down to the same overall rating as that of PriceGrabber.