How To Find Best Online Deals When Shopping For Software
With so many comparison shopping search engines, you no longer
have an excuse to buy software full price. These simple pointers
will show you how to get 10-50% off practically any software or
game.
Tip One - compare the price comparison engines.
The top three price comparison engines are Froogle (by Google),
Yahoo!Shopping (shopping.yahoo.com) and PriceGrabber. Froogle is
the most comprehensive of the three because it does not charge
merchants for their listings. The benefit of that is a a very
large inventory of listings. However, sometimes this results in
obscuring results. For instance, if you enter "Luxor Game" in
order to search for a popular casual downloadable game by
MumboJumbo, the first six listings will be totally unrelated to
the product searched for. On the other hand, Froogle does
usually find the best deal for software or games and posts it on
the very first page, so all you have to do is to weed out
irrelevant results. In this particular case, Froogle was able to
find a merchant selling Luxor for $17.99
Yahoo!Shopping, on the other hand, provides more relevant
results, with a proper match for "Luxor Game" in the very first
position. However, Yahoo!Shopping only list products sold
through Yahoo!Shops, therefore the inventory is much smaller,
which decreases a chance of finding the lowest price. In this
case, the best price for Luxor is $18.88, well above Froogle's.
PriceGrabber works as a paid inclusion service, which means that
its inventory of listings is smallest of the three comparison
engines. However, because some large software merchants use this
service, occasionally, PriceGrabber offers a rare chance fo find
a really great deal. In case with "Luxor Game", PriceGrabber
matched Yahoo! at $18.88, which is still below Froogle's results.
Tip Two - search only for downloadable versions.
Even though you may find very good prices through Froogle,
Yahoo!Shopping or PriceGrabber, a vast majority of the merchants
sell boxed versions of software that need to be shipped. These
shipping charges often increase the price of software by three
to five dollars, which is quite significant for software that
may cost only twenty dollars or less. Solution? Buy
downloadables version.
The two best places to go for downloadable software are
Download.Com (a CNET site) and Deprice.Com. CNET's Download.Com
is not a price comparison search engine. However, it lists over
50000 software and game titles that can be downloaded and bought
online. The prices are listed right below the date software was
added.
Deprice.Com is a specialized website that list only discounted
and only downloadable software. It's searchable database
contains only 14000 listings, which is not large enough to cover
all popular software, but is still worth the search.