So, where to find the best bargain on the latest foo, bar and baz that you always dream to have? Want to save that extra $2 getting that new motherboard? Sick of spending whole night checking out each individual e-commerce site and compare their prices? I have discovered price comparison websites a few years ago, and that has helped me greatly hunting down the cheap deals on the Internet.

Price Comparison Websites

How do they work? Usually those site would design some screen scraper, which goes out to retailer sites and record down what those sites are selling, and how much they are selling for. So when you make a search on a price comparison site, it would be able to find out which shop has the cheapest deal. Since they normally have hundreds of retail shop pricing in their database, it makes finding the bargain a trivial exercise.

These are the ones in Australia:

• RazorPrices – the original price comparison site. (Note: it auto-redirects me to their new site, which has nothing to do price comparison but on computer component tradings. Might need to investigate on that)
• staticICE – easy to use interface and very speedy search. This is what I normally use today.
• Shopbot.com.au – not just computer parts, but also electronics. However, search result is not ordered by price, which makes it a bit useless.
• au.PriceSpy.biz – instead of search, it lists all the components and their lowest price and associated shops. Good for common components (like RAM or CPU), but difficult to use if you want to find a specific product.
• OzPriceGuide – again it does not let you search, but give you specific categories that you can browse.