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Pundits have long accused the internet of being little more than an oversized shopping mall and with the Holiday season in full swing more and more of us are using it as one. The rise of so-called web 2.0 has given birth to a new range of shopping sites that aim to improve internet shopping and raise it to a level of sophistication and ease that the Mall of America can only dream about.
Everyone knows about Amazon, Froogle, Ebay and the other big name players, but searching for a product, whether you know specifically what you want, or you're just browsing for Christmas ideas, is just about as time consuming as wandering through the real mall. Of course you do avoid the crowds and the musak, but it's still far from perfect.
However, there's a whole crop of new shopping sites that can make your experience quicker and more enjoyable. Most of these sites don't sell anything at all, rather they help to distill, condense, search, recommend and otherwise scour the web in search of the best deal on whatever your heart desires. Instead of browsing for what you want, these sites can deliver it to your door.
The most sophisticated of these new sites is Offertrax, an innovative online shopping service that combines the best features of social bookmarking tools with RSS feeds to help you track your online shopping.
Offertrax allows you to create what it calls "tracks." Tracks are containers for bookmarks of products you interested in. When you find something you like on another site, click the bookmarklet that Offertrax provides and give the bookmark a title, description and a choice of images to represent the product. You can then add the bookmark to any of your existing tracks, or create a new track.
In addition to bookmarks Offertrax lets you add reviews, notes and control whether or not your tracks are public or private.
So far it sounds pretty much like del.icio.us or other bookmarking sites, but here's the difference: Offertrax gives you an RSS feed and will send you announcements whenever prices change or special offers are available.
Offertrax sends out bots once an hour to check all the bookmarks in your tracks. If they find a change you'll be notified in your RSS reader, or when you visit the site if RSS feeds aren't your bag.
While Offertrax lets you add reviews, the reviews are intended to be you doing the reviewing, what would be nice is a way collect other reviews from around the web. I'd like to see is a way to bookmark existing reviews and add then to my tracks. For instance, if I'm shopping for a new camera, I'd like to have all my camera bookmarks be joined with bookmarks to reviews on site like dpreview.com in the same track container. That way I could see my research and track products all in one interface. As it is the track feature is the only dynamic off-site feature.
This would probably be the time to note that Offertrax is thus far a beta product and I'm sure that they'll be adding new features in the future.
Stylefeeder is a shopping community site that also borrows some ideas from the social bookmarking sites. To say Stylefeeder is just a social bookmarking site focused on shopping is not entirely accurate. It is that, but because the bookmarks are products and because the community is public, Stylefeeder is actually a shopping site in its own right.
Rather than trying to maintain a wishlist on Amazon, Yahoo and others, Stylefeeder allows you to condense everything in one place. Stylefeeder offers a nice bookmarklet for your browser's toolbar. When you're on a site that has something you'd like to buy, just click the bookmarklet and it will be saved to your Stylefeed.
The bookmarklet features a nice piece of Javascript that lets you select any image on the bookmarked page to use for that bookmark. It's so dead simple even your grandmother could use it.
Stylefeeder has all the features you'd expect from a social bookmarking site such as tags, ratings, RSS feeds and groups. Unfortunately Stylefeeder doesn't offer RSS price updates like Offertrax, but the community around the site is definitely larger so there are more reviews and tips.
Online shopping site Mpire is another big player in the new world of online shopping. Mpire is a destination site in its own right, but for consumers the real draw may well be the recently release Firefox plugin.
Rather than trying to track prices from the site (which you can also do if you like), the plugin allows you to take the power of Mpire's price comparison tools to any site you visit. The plugin essentially put the MPire site data just a click away from nearly any shopping site.
Once installed, clicking the Mpire plugin tool will pop up a small bar at the bottom of your screen that compares prices, offers review links and other tools for the item on the page you're browsing. Similar to Farecast, the airline price comparison site, there are predictive graphs in the Mpire plugin indicating whether the price of an item is likely to go up or down based past sales.
Unfortunately, right now the Plugin is only available for Firefox, but hopefully we'll see something similar for Internet Explorer and other Browsers in the near future.
Boddit is another new bargain shopping site that's one part search engine, one part price tracker.
Boddit works by pulling in prices from a number of big internet discount trackers like Dealnews, Slickdeals, Fatwallet and many more. Rather than searching all those sites individually, Boddit lets you search them all at once.
Boddit also offers what they call "web search, Boddit-style" which amounts to creating a frame with a toolbar on the left of your browser window and performing searches of other sites in another frame. Normally I hate anything that creates frames in my browser, but Boddit’s was actually helpful and made searching multiple sites much quicker.
For instance with a single click I was able to jump from searching Pricegrabber to Froogle to Yahoo! Shopping and more. Unfortunately because Boddit apparently sends the search info as POST data, you back button will warn you about resubmitting a form, which is annoying, but worth the trade off in my opinion.
Boddit will also search and browse auctions on Ebay, Half.com and Yahoo! Auctions and even Craig’s List.
All these sites and other like them offer you tools to improve your internet shopping experience and in the end none is really better than the other, simply different. Your best bet might be to combine them all and create your own ultimate shopping experience. After all, when it comes to deciding how to spend your hard-earned cash you can use all the tricks you can find.
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