I browsed around and read several reviews for different product categories to see if I can learn anything new and was pleased to find a few useful shopping tips regarding product features that I wouldn’t otherwise pay attention to, things like “carrying handle is a must have for a portable space heater” and “when choosing a vacuum, pay attention to the length of the power cord”. It certainly pays to do your homework and Cheapism reviews is a great resource if you need a head start.

My favorite part of the site however is the Cheap News where Cheapism writers post short daily updates linking to news stories from around the web. I love the assortment of the picks, just the kind of news I am looking for when scouring my RSS feeds and newspapers. The part of Cheapism I didn’t quite like was the site navigation and this is where Mr. Levitte can learn a trick or two from his past employer, ConsumerSearch.com, who I think offer a cleaner and more convenient user experience for the shoppers.

What resources do you use when researching a consumer product? Do you have a favorite product reviews site? Please share it in the comments!

This is February 2009 revision of the Popular Coupon sites list. You can find the previous revision of the list here.

The change in rating shows the difference compared to January results. This list currently has 31 sites - one more than in January (webbyplanet.com is in). On average the coupon sites have lost (3.26%) in February.

The best performer is 8coupons.com (18.41%), who also moves up by 3 positions, and the worst result comes from currentcodes.com (-27.3h%). Enjoy the complete list below!

#	Web Site	Alexa Rank		Page Rank		Online Since
1	retailmenot.com (info)	1453	(-7.95%)	6		27-Oct-2006
2 (1)	eversave.com	1833	(17.25%)	4		08-Apr-1999
3 (1)	coolsavings.com	1929	(-9.17%)	5		03-Jun-1996
4	coupons.com	2577	(9.29%)	6		07-Sep-1994
5	couponmountain.com	5502	(-1.64%)	5		05-May-2001
6	couponcabin.com	7177	(-13.2%)	5		27-Feb-2003
7	coupons.smartsource.com	14366	(9.68%)	5		27-Apr-1995
8	mycoupons.com	20076	(-1.3%)	5		16-Feb-1999
9	couponmom.com	21393	(-0.26%)	6		25-Jun-2002
10	savings.com	23628	(2.04%)	4		20-Apr-1995
11	ultimatecoupons.com	26218	(-6.54%)	4		02-Jul-2001
12 (1)	tjoos.com	29526	(2.55%)	4		16-Jun-2007
13 (1)	hotcouponworld.com	30328	(-21.85%)	4		15-Jun-2006
14	couponwinner.com	30550	(1.2%)	4		30-Jan-2006
15 (1)	deallocker.com	34580	(-7.02%)	4		24-Mar-2007
16 (2)	fabuloussavings.com	35820	(5.84%)	5		27-Jan-1999
17 (2)	wow-coupons.com	35875	(-12.7%)	4		26-Nov-2003
18 (1)	valpak.com	37255	(-5.2%)	5		22-Jun-1994
19 (3)	8coupons.com	41494	(18.41%)	5		11-Jun-2006
20 (1)	couponcodes4u.com	41688	(4.02%)	5		01-Aug-2007
21 (1)	flamingoworld.com	45015	(-3.05%)	5		19-May-1999
22 (1)	couponseven.com	53933	(-13.56%)	4		23-May-2006
23	couponshare.com	55451	(-8.89%)	4		21-Jan-2002
24	thegrocerygame.com	59871	(-5.41%)	5		28-Aug-2001
25 (1)	couponchief.com	60013	(-3.89%)	5		15-Jan-2005
26 (1)	currentcodes.com	72954	(-27.3%)	5		27-Dec-2000
27	gogoshopper.com	73342	(-18.52%)	4		16-Dec-1999
28	couponheaven.com	77744	(-11.28%)	3		28-Sep-2003
29 (1)	couponsurfer.com	80682	(6.11%)	4		11-Feb-1998
30 (1)	shopping-bargains.com	85261	(-12.18%)	5		20-Feb-1999
31 (1)	webbyplanet.com	99538	(13.37%)	4		09-Feb-2006

A little bit of history. The magazine started in 1979 in Florida and was the first nationwide classified advertising newsletter devoted entirely to the computer hobby. Think of it as the pre-Internet price comparison tool for mail order computer merchandise. Stan Veit who became the Editor-in-Chief in 80’s has added more meat to the product price tables and turned the magazine into a successful publication that would rival TV Guide for newsstand circulation. The Shopper changed several owners in the following years and is currently run by SX2 Media Labs, a VC-funded startup.

The growth of the Web is probably the main factor that contributed to the magazine decline, and judging by this ReviewMe request, the new owners recognize it by betting on the online version, which I personally prefer over the paper one. So why would you want to read the magazine now, and what does it offer for the bargain hunter type of crowd?

Besides the daily computer and periphery reviews, which is the magazine’s main strength, there is a rubric called ShopTalk which features daily news bits for gadget junkies with money. I especially like the DealHunter page where the editors post daily picks for budget oriented consumers. Another interesting place to visit on Computer Shopper is the downloads page which is one of the largest available portals for free software downloads on the Web.

The email I received with this review request also mentions the recently launched Deals and Coupons section for computer products. After examining it I do not recommend you spending your time on it. Not only it is hard to navigate, it also doesn’t seem to offer anything else but a product feed from affiliated merchants, some of which can barely be called deals.

My overall impression from the website is not very positive, mostly because of the overwhelming amount of display ads. Being a shopping magazine it can and must have less ads to remain a growing online business. Do you subscribe to Computer Shopper? Have you been to their website recently? Please tell me about your own impression in the comments.

This is post is sponsored by Computer Shopper via ReviewMe

Eversave.com features an extensive recipe section, which lets you find recipes by multiple approaches. There is also an “Articles & Tips” section, which includes articles covering a very broad array of topics. Most of the articles are very concise and carefully plug links to various coupons and advertising (annoying) features of the website.

Design and looks are very professional. However most advertising (including the “Hot Offers” link in the navigation bar) take you to pages which force you to pick (click) a link/offer. If you have ever visited the free giveaway websites, which insist on signing up for offers, this is almost like that. When you enter such types of pages, regular navigational elements will be missing, making it tough to not click the links they want, unless you use your browsers back button.

On researching about the coupons in detail, very few are real coupons, most are just links to promotions/offers going on various sites. And all of these are done by partnering with keycode.com, which is more of an advertising channel for merchants (by telling about various offers they have) and not a coupon site by definition. However occasional, merchants might give special offers for keycode.com with a special code. So eventually, eversave.com will never get the typical coupons you want to find. But will help you find “links” to promotions.

Eversave also features printable store coupons, which is again just front for its parnet smartsource.com, which is one other coupon site, which require special software to be installed, to enable printing coupons.

So in a nutshell, Eversave is not a coupon site at all. It is a just a well designed site with cleverly drafted content and navigational menu items, which hope to take you into an annoying advertising technique. In addition, there are also “links” (not coupons) to several online stores which features promotions in those stores.

This week’s review is about BradsDeals.com. Bradsdeals.com happens to be the last item in Yan’s this month revision of popular deal sites and is also the youngest site (Jun 2005) without a review.

This is a really simple site with a handful of clear menu items on top, taking to various sections of the sites. Briefly, the three vital sections of the site are deals, coupons and forums.

Like many other sites, every deal posted to the main site, results in one thread added to the forum. There is also a section in the forum, which lets users submit deals, however there is not a very high amount of activity there. Coupons section has a decent collection of coupons (2000+ coupons from 800+ stores).

There is a site search right on top of every page. A quick checked proved to be very unimpressive. I tried to search for “external hard drive”. There are several items, with the same phrase listed as a part of the name. However, the search system performs a logical OR query and no ranking for best results. So, the first external hard drive in the results I got was at about 10th position only.

The core elements of the site - deals - have a picture with a paragraph which describes the product in short and how to get the deal. Bradsdeals makes a paragraph with this information, while other sites make bulleted points or something like that. Also the deals feature a slightly bigger image than other deal sites and the deals are in a 2 column layout, thereby giving it a look which is not very typical to a deal site.

One thing which is obvious on visiting this site is the high media coverage it has got. The header section shows that this website has been featured in several main stream news media. Also the left column of the home page shows screen grab of Brad Wilson live of some news channel. I am not sure how this website has managed to get so much media coverage, while there is nothing exotic. Surely, this media coverage should have helped them a lot in becoming popular.

Yan’s listing shows that this website is online since Jun’05, which I believe he should have picked up from Alexa. However digging into BradsDeals.com shows that it has actually been online since 2001. It is a known fact that most deal sites created around & before that time period have all become popular and have regular visitors. This answers the question, how come they are one among the popular deal sites?

For me, this is just one other deal site. Just nothing interesting.

On the first look, Spoofee.com has a clean and uncluttered look and feel. This site uses variations of blue and white, which is now used in several popular sites.

The top menu contains links to the coupons section of the website, freebies section of the forums, a page listing links to weekly ads from various stores, a link to the forum index (termed as community) and an about us link.

The left bar features hot coupons and hot deals neatly formatted. The main content area lists deals and new & expiring coupons. Typically each day has about 10-15 deals. The details posted for each deal is impressive and is the best I have seen until now! The following details are listed for most deals:

i. A rating of the deal is 5 point scale
ii. Details about product review ratings received for the product at other websites (just a few words telling the rating)
iii. PriceGrabber price range (this is really useful as it lets you evaluate how good the deal is)
iv. Detailed instruction on how to get the deal, sometimes the deals instruction is as detailed as buying a coupon code from Ebay.

As you can see, this information is really comprehensive. A quick check showed that most of the deal details are accurate.

On the coupons section, there are about 300-350 active coupons.

The forum section has a variety of topics as in other sites, with topics for Deals (which also includes comments for the items posted on the home page), Freebies and Giveaways, Coupons , Off Topics etc. The Coupons section of the forum has about 3-4 coupons posted per day. The Freebies section is really active and has a about 10 new posts per day.

Given that the deals posted on the home page are so informative, one might wonder why Spoofee.com is not as popular as leading deal sites. In my view, the answer to this is the very small number of deals posted per day. Additionally, the number of coupons is also less (300-350 active coupons) for the given wide range of stores. Thus though very strong on the quality of the deals posted, the quantity doesn’t help make Spoofee strong as neither a deal site nor a coupon site.

Now again wanting to pick a site to review, I picked the youngest baby among the latest revision of Yan’s Popular Price Comparison Sites series, thefind.com. thefind.com is actually the second youngest in the list (next to ugenie, which should no more be in the list) and the second best performer last month (30%, again next to ugenie.com’s 59%).

First look at the home page (this is the first time I have ever been to the site): looks different compared to most popular price comparison sites. A quick read on the home page suggests that “search” is their strength. So, I am going to try the same set of searches I tried on PriceGrabber and Cnet Shopper.

So the first search term is “Canon Powershot” and returns correct information as expected. The information returned from the search is pretty impressive. Every search result can be quickly previewed in a callout box. Refining is possible based on: local results (based on my IP), “New” items and “Sale” items. There is one more refining option which cool - “Color”. It took me few seconds to realize what it meant. When you click on color, a box shows some of the popular colors, on picking it; you can use a slide bar to make variations to that color. Once you pick the color and hit update, the engine finds all results, with images containing a shade of the color you picked! Though not heavily useful at first thought, for a girl searching for the pink camera, this is a direct shot. This can be very useful in non-tech stuff like clothing etc. You can also change the location it guessed for you, from your IP as well as refine by price. This page also shows related searches.

Before continuing with the next search, I should write about some small annoyances I found. The page has a Mac FishEye like menu for the tabs on top of the search results. While it is a cool one, it annoys the user while moving the cursor across the page. Coolness is important, but not at the cost of annoying the user.

We will now continue with the searches and then return to see the product details page. Now I search for “Elph” expecting various cameras and related printers, which worked perfect. On searching for “2077B001” a manufacturer part no, the result was right with all of the individual stores carrying it getting one spot in the results. Next, Digital Recorder (purposefully skipped the word ‘Voice’ in-between) and the results were perfect. “Recorder” listed a variety products like Digital Voice Recorders, DVD Recorders etc – perfect. “Nikon Powershot” - Purposefully goofed up, I expected all Nikon products as well as Canon Powershot cameras to be listed, worked as expected.

So overall, search engine works perfect, in view of my limited testing. The product details page is pretty simple. A very small description about the product and with all the stores and their prices listed is no particular order.

The site offers to save items viewed and these items appear in a sticky curved box on the bottom of the screen. However I found it annoying that the box occupied a significant portion of my little screen, while I never saved anything.

thefind.com does not allow to shortlist items based on technical features etc. Nor does it carry product/seller ratings. So this site is all about finding a product and getting the lowest price. So let’s see, how good is thefind.com in what it is supposed to do mainly: find the lowest price. Here I am testing with Canon EOS 40D SLR Digital Camera Body Only (1901B004).

I should here write that the tab on top of the search results have options like All Stores, Mall Stores, Boutiques etc. From my limited analysis, I guess that Mall Stores refers to some of the huge retailers like Staples, OfficeMax, Bestbuy, Wal-Mart etc who have a location close to you. In this particular search (Canon EOS 40D Body), I see one sponsored listing on top of “All Offers” which takes to a page with about 15 of the prominent online stores. The lowest price possible from the 15 stores is $1099, which needs to be found manually, as there is no sorting option. This price was from BeachCamera.com and BuyDig.com. Pricegrabber was able to find one for $1064 from US1Camera, but as I have told in my previous reviews, no one knows how good/reliable these stores are, so these comparison engines should only be used to find the lowest range possible.

However if I do not restrict my self to that “Sponsored” result, I see the camera for $1000 from Aeronautic Pictures, which is a Amazon Associate store, with the camera actually listed for $1098 ! The “non-sponsored” results, have a lot of unheard stores and there are a total of 197 results and it is definitely not worth scrolling through every page. So, I would say, just see the sponsored results to get the range and that’s it.

Overall, good search functionality and some cool features like refine by color etc. Some overload of JavaScript coolness is obvious. Also, a lot of crappy never heard stores with some inaccurate pricing.

RMN certainly does not have a typical coupon website look (cluttered design) but a rather interesting look, though a bit girlish in my books ;). Users rating coupons by indicating if the coupon worked is a brilliant idea. Even though the idea carries a very small execution, the effect of the voting can be seen in Yan’s monthly coupon site ratings, with RetailMeNot at the 2nd position. Also, user’s have the option to submit coupons.

The TechCrunch article notes that RMN features about 71,000 coupons from 13,000 merchants, which sounds very impressive. The success at RMN should also be attributed for not being behind in technology. The Firefox Extension, IGoogle Gadget, Bookmarklet and Mac Widget are some good examples. RMN also uses some of the buzz features popular with websites, such as Tag Cloud, related tags etc.

Being a user driven coupon site, the quality of coupons cannot really be attributed to RMN (good or bad) but should be attributed to its users. I have used their coupons in the past and the coupon ratings there generally seem to be good (meaning, if there is a 60% or more rating, there is a bigger chance of working for you).

Now let’s go back to last Monday’s announcement about the “Community” launch and associated discussions. The TechCrunch story includes a demo video which is about 5 minutes long, with Guy King of RMN. As I was watching the demo, I strongly felt like I have seen this “community” platform somewhere and on digging my bookmarks, it was from socialengine.net. Literally, nothing but a downloaded script, very minimally modified. However for someone watching the video on TechCrunch, Guy King makes it sound like a home grown script and never utters a word about actually buying it. I am not even sure why there needs to be a launch for it. It is just a downloaded script which is being put out in the site to see if it helps them. There is definitely nothing wrong in buying a script (that is for what they are made for), but a 5 minute interview about the script and RMN making it sound like built at home was really silly.

Today going back to TechCrunch to read more comments, this (about socialengine.net) has been discussed in the comments as well. Also there is a message (#35) about coupons for certain merchants being blocked.

Digging (Googling) more into it, there are about 125 merchants, for whom RetailMeNot does not have any real coupon, but has pretentious links, which make you think that you are getting a discount, but all that you (user) do is, help them earn a commission and nothing else. See this page for an example: http://www.retailmenot.com/view/netflix.com (do not forget to read the comments for the 2 “featured discounts”). In my view this is nothing but just a “rip off”.

The introduction of this Community network concept is to “expand” the existing community. To see how big a community they have, I checked their forums; they have 1984 members, with only 16 members having more than 4 posts! So there is no real community, but coupon ratings has been successful as there is no need to log in/sign up to rate a coupon and it does not really consume any time to click that single button.

On the whole, RMN has one strong point - RATED COUPONS and other than that, everything else surrounding RMN is just a buzz.

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.

Here is my first impression on visiting the home page, lots and lots of information in a single page. But there is a limit to it and this is too lot, to call it overloaded/cluttered. Doing a print preview (A4) on Firefox shows that there are 20 pages of content, which is about 11,500 words! Wow, that is just too much for any homepage. Added to this are the advertisements (banners, block of Google text ads) etc.

The homepage has a 3 column layout with the left side listing pretty much all the popular items in most categories while the right side is a listing of coupons for most of the websites they deal with. The center column lists deals for the past 2 days (no pagination) followed by two blocks titled “More News” and “Non-tech News” and which are nothing but again deals. A quick reading of the FAQ shows that they refer the deals as bargain news.

On continuing to read the FAQ, it shows that this website aspired to be a website like AnandTech (guide people on making decisions on tech products and additionally help in buying them) but then a visit to Product Reviews section of the forum shows that, this aspect of the website just does not make any appeal.

Before seeing the actual main content, we will see the items in the top menu of the homepage. The menu item “Coupons” takes to a page with all the coupons in a single page (no pagination) followed by a list of all the vendors who have a coupon. Interesting that Calvin Klein Underwear, ProFlowers and Yahoo Personals are listed on this “Tech” Bargains website. I should here tell that several deal websites have this habit of just listing every online vendor out there.

Next item in the menu is “Deal Request”, this page already warns- “don’t expect us to really respond, but will try to steer towards the deal you wanted, in the future”. To me this is translates as “You idiot, submit your request. I have no time to work on finding a deal for you nor do I have time to reply to you. However, as a coincidence, if there is a deal which comes up in our website, which remotely matches the deal you wanted, just think that this deal was made just for you and feel happy and don’t forget to buy it through my website and make me also happy.”

Next item on the menu is “Rebates”. The top of this page has featured rebates in a table with one column titled “Price without rebate”. It is interesting that all these products cost 0.00 without a rebate. Wow! The comments column is also interesting, which just says “Various”. After this “Featured Rebates” is “Recently expired and Expiring Soon Rebates” – why should they list the recently expired rebates.

Next item on the menu is “Vendor Info”, this page lists 346 vendors! There is this useful feature which lets you shortlist vendors who charge no sales tax in your state, as well as vendors with free shipping/international shipping. The tax free listing, just omits vendors from your state. Quickly seeing the list, I saw that Target was listed as tax free for me, just because they have Target listed from Minnesota (Target’s headquarters). These “Tech” wizards need to know that internet taxing is not based on just where you headquarters is but based on states you operate.

Final item on the menu is “Low Price Search” which is just a PriceGrabber page with the look of TechBargains.

Finally down to the main content in the home page, deals are listed with the newest deals on top. Each deal includes an image, small description, with a link to search pricegrabber for the lowest price, email the deal, find similar deals, find more deals from the same vendor and see for historical deals of that product. Now I randomly check 10 different deals on the home page. All 10 were just perfect, again this is one other website with just no great look/features but just solid deals listed.

A quick trip to the forums shows that it is pretty active and is just like any other deal website forum, heavily moderated to cut out spam and self promotions. Have a lot of deals listed and one big good thing, does not duplicate items listed in the home page (some websites duplicate pretty much every deal).

Overall, content wise good, but pretty weak when it comes to usability, look and cool features.