Online Shopping Guide

Online Shopping - Checked Out

As the volume of online shopping inceases more and more shoppers are using shopping review and comparison sites.

These sites seemingly offer an excellent service to customers - providing product reviews and finding the lowest prices.

Search results

A handful of shopping sites dominate the search engine results for brands, types and models of all manner of products.  However on closer investigation all is not what it seems.  Are the days gone of if the result is high on Google then it must be the best site?

Reviews

The reviews on shopping comparison  sites are often little more than a manufacurers product detail - no actual individual has tried, tested and then written about their experiences of the products.

Price

The best price comparison site will offer a selection of prices from various stores however it is important to note that only sites that PAY the shopping site are looked at.  It is likely that the product is available cheaper elsewhere but if there is no affiliation between a retailer and the shopping price comparisson site then they will not be shown.

Quite often visitors are wowed that the cheapest prices displayed beat the most expensive by a lot - but if you double check that cheapest price is about "the going rate" for the product.

Following the huge success of ebay the emergence of Social Networking has produced sites on which users are now able to add there items for sale in free classified ads targeting a local market

ItsMyMarket is not a shopping site as such. In attempts to build great community areas sites like this offer weather, traffic, whats on and listings in regions that visitors define by post code. They can even build their own community web page and maintain blogs

Credit Card Safety - Shop safely online

Almost all online shopping is done by credit card however Paypal is becoming more common. Credit card fraud is an issue to take seriously. I prefer to have a credit card that i use solely for internet use. Again it pays to shop around for the best deals - interest rates and fees can vary hugely between cards - if you have existing debts on high interest cards look to swapping to a interest free deal on balance transfers - some lenders such as Mint offer up to 18 monthes interest free on balance transfers if you switch to their credit card

The future

As the web grows and users become more demanding developers must find much better shopping comparisons and ideally build them into informational sites that offer well researched details of products and services.