Published March 12th, 2010
in Popular Sites Series.
This is February 2010 revision of the Popular Price Comparison web sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.
The change in rating shows the difference compared to January results. The list has a total of 32 web sites which is one less than the last month (bestwebbuys.com is out after being the worst site for 3 months in a row). There are 18 more sites in my database that don’t meet Alexa Rank < 100,000 requirement. The average price comparison site has lost (10.61%) this month
The best performer this month is again sortprice.com (3.13%) followed by like.com with a gain of (1.25%). The worst performer this month is dealighted.com with a loss of (-65.85%) followed by (again) shoplocal.com (-43.05%). Please enjoy the complete list below.
Continue reading ‘Popular price comparison sites – February 2010’
Published May 20th, 2009
in Money Saving Tools.
Visual shopping is the area I anxiously watch for the next break through. My latest discovery is Modista, a website built by two Computer Science Ph.D. students at UC Berkeley which allows you to browse several kinds of products from multiple merchants. The selection is limited to shoes, purses, eyeglasses, and watches and functionality is somewhat basic but there is something appealing in this simplicity.
Modista is essentially a matrix of products aggregated from different merchants and arranged by similarity. X-axis offers same items by shape while Y-axis - same color. Clicking on a product in the matrix makes your new selection current and populates the matrix with new similar products. The whole shopping experience is somewhat similar to browsing real store shelves where a virtual store assistant is constantly feeding you with look-a-like products.
The site works exceptionally well with shoes and a somewhat worse with other product categories. You can narrow your search by price, color, and a few other product specific characteristics (like size for shoes) and also add your selections to a ‘favorite’ list. This is pretty much it.
While Modista is one of the more elegant implementations of visual shopping, they are not the first nor the most advanced solution. That title probably goes to like.com who were the pioneers in this niche and grew tremendously every since (judging by my monthly reports). Besides the entire social aspect missing at Modista, like.com also offers some advanced shopping features like an ability to upload an image of your own product, or select a certain area on the product photo and base your visual search on that area alone.
I loved the easiness and visual aspect Modista brings to online shopping however when I showed Modista to my friend, the answer was ‘it causes flickering in my eyes’, so your mileage can certainly vary. ;-)
Published June 11th, 2008
in Popular Sites Series.
This is May 2008 revision of the Popular Price Comparison web sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.
Just a few remarkable changes. like.com (23.68%) keeps advancing (first place for second month in a row) while calibex.com (-25.13%) lost a quarter of Alexa rank. Comparing to the data for May of last year, like.com moved from #26 to #21 while calibex.com moved from #16 to #18.
A new site has broken the 50K Alexa threshold, salescircular.com (-9.56%). It has a terrible design, tons of Google ads, and broken link to the FAQ page. I consider taking down the entry.
(*) Note: traffic stats for these sites is an aggregate of all traffic to the top domain (e.g. Yahoo.com or Google.com) and thus cannot be used to judge how popular this particular price comparison service is.
Published May 9th, 2007
in Popular Sites Series.
This is April 2007 revision of the Popular Price Comparison web sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.
The change in rating shows the difference compared to March results. The list has a total of 34 web sites. There are 14 more in my database that didn’t meet the Alexa Rank < 100,000 requirement.
On average the rating declined by 7.27% which is an improvement over the last month’s 15.88%. mytriggers.com dropped out of the list this month (I guess the idea of subscribing to price changes never took off), and I added two new participants: calibex.com and bestwebbuys.com.
The winner in April is again sortprice.com with a gain of 25.79%. It sounds like this was anticipated since I got a comment from them just today inquiring on the next update. If I hadn’t added calibex.com, sortprice.com would have jumped from #21 to #20 as they outpaced thefind.com.
The worst performer is like.com with a Alexa loss of 23.83% (beating pricewatch.com by just a notch). The decrease comes as a part of a long slide (pictured below) the website is experiencing ever since they debuted their “colorful” service late last year. Surprisingly though their Google rank increased this update.
Another interesting development is pricegrabber.com (and bottomdollar.com who are a part of pricegrabber.com) gaining Google rank of 9 which is more than anyone else in the list.
Overall Price Comparison sites fared much better than Deal Sites who I reviewed just last week. Enjoy the complete list below!
(*) Note: traffic stats for these sites is an aggregate of all traffic to the top domain (e.g. Yahoo.com or Google.com) and thus cannot be used to judge how popular this particular price comparison service is.
(**) Note: the web site is a portal with price comparison engine being one of the offered web services. Alexa rank cannot be used to judge how popular this price comparison engine is.
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