Deal Finders
Next-generation shopping sites aim to help you find great prices on the best products, from sellers you can trust. Which ones deliver?
Grace Aquino
Best for Cheapskates
Yahoo tied Shopzilla in second place for the best base price (behind MSN) on the camera. Its hard-drive results matched the average of the nine sites. What's nice, though, is that Yahoo features a dedicated category for sales and promotions (MSN does, too) and provides links to used and refurbished products, which could mean more savings.
To browse for more bargains, it's worth sorting through the clutter of MSN Shopping (shopping.msn.com). MSN recently partnered with Shopping.com, so it should pull from both databases and produce lots of results. It worked for my camera search, finding 45 stores--the most in my test--and it located the lowest base price, too. It even listed eBay auctions.
But it was impossible to see all of the search results at once. The site initially returned 19 listings, one of which was a generic link to 27 additional stores (I couldn't tell whether those were from Shopping.com's database or from MSN's). If you browse quickly, it's easy to overlook those merchants; and you can't compare their results to the original listings. Another annoyance: MSN does not provide a bottom-line cost.
If you're just looking for a great deal on a camera or other gadget and aren't particular about the model, specialty sites StealDeals.net (www.stealdeals.net) and Techbargains (www.techbargains.com) feature deals of the day. For instance, StealDeals lists online bargains in categories such as computers and home theater, while Techbargains helps you ferret out coupons, as well as online and local deals--it even searches eBay. (Disclosure: Techbargains powers PCWorld.com's Bargain Finder.) Both sites also let you sign up for e-mail alerts if your desired product drops in price.
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