Discount Shopping at Compare4.us

Discount Shopping at Compare4.us

When you shop in a brick and mortar store, I'm sure you do price comparison shopping informally. I know I do. Standing in the Walmart or Target, there are usually between two to five choices for everything. This is why I can never get out of the store in less than an hour. Think about the shopping behavior. You stand there, looking at the different options and try to make the best purchase decision. One major factor in your decision process is price. So, you are doing price comparison shopping informally in your head.

The Internet allows you to do price comparison shopping from your living room more formally by comparing prices side-by-side on a web site. I think this is a truly amazing convenience. Here, technology is really an advantage for the consumer. With the Internet bringing the data from thousands of merchants together in one place, a buyer can do price comparison shopping on a scale never before attainable. This is what economists call "perfect price information." With the high reliability of shipping, there is really no need to visit the physical store either. You can compare, select, and purchase the product entirely through your computer. The only time when a store visit is required is for larger items or those items that you simply must see before purchasing. Large TVs, jewelry and cars are examples of items I would not buy without seeing first. However, in every case, I complete a thorough price comparison exercise on the Internet first. I usually print the output from the price comparison shopping site and take that with me to the store or dealer as a reference tool.

There has been a more recent trend in price comparison shopping web sites that offers even more choices to the buyer. Each of the major price comparison shopping engines have traditionally been trying to bring Internet users to their sites through direct advertising. However, in the last few years these businesses have been opening up their databases for smaller sites to program automatic data exchanges with them. This is know as an application programmer interface ("API"). In layman's terms, it means that two web sites communicate with each other to exchange data based on user input. For example, if a user on my site is asking for books on the topic of price comparison shopping, my site can send the data to Amazon and the resulting products can be represented on my site, back to the user who requested it. The end-user doesn't know that the data came from a different site, and it all happens in a matter of milliseconds. The price comparison shopping sites are using this as a distribution mechanism to help grow their businesses. If you've ever wondered why Amazon products are everywhere on the Internet and not just on their site, this is why. Amazon.com has been a leader in API development, which has helped them place their products on thousands of sites on the Internet. The big advantage to end-users is that a new breed of price comparison shopping sites are emerging. Specifically, meta-shopping sites can be built that actually pull from many different comparison shopping site databases at once using these API's. Think of a site that merges the power of the Amazon, Shopping.com, and eBay product databases all with one click. This is a real win for the shopper and saves time for the buyer. End-users are now able to get product information at a level that was not possible even a few years ago.

With the help of new APIs, several major databases are queried in a matter of milliseconds based on end-user search criteria. Product price and consumer review information is automatically pulled from many of the leading product databases to give the buyer the best from millions of prices, pictures and reviews. This simply offers you the best and fastest shopping experience. That's what we aim to do here. Enjoy.