Like anything, good shopping is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. James explains how and where to find the best bargains
Looking for bargains, as with any human
endeavour, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. In this case, the latter
normally occurs when you’re crammed into crowded shops fighting over
marked-down goods in the January sales. With the country in the grip of a
seemingly endless financial meltdown, it’s more important than ever to make
sure you’re getting the best bargains on anything you want to buy, whether
that’s on your weekly shopping or, more importantly, on the shiny new computer
hardware you want to furnish yourself with.
Using
Price Comparison Sites
It’s one thing to be in a shop and have a
helpful yellow sticker on things you want to buy, but trying to find bargains
online is a bit more of a slog, not unlike looking for a needle in a large pile
of needles. With so many options available, locating the best price on the
internet is actually quite difficult.
You might find this counter inuitive; isn’t
the internet supposed to make things easier, after all? Well, unless the thing
you’re trying to make easier is ‘ignoring the opinions of people who want to leave
idiotic comments on a news stories’, it should do just that. You just have to
know where to look.
And that’s our cue. With the knowledge that
most of you will be facing January with a fistful of cash to spend, whether
it’s leftover Christmas money or your preferred antidote to the post-holiday
slump, we’ve put together a simple guide to finding the best hardware bargains
online. So read this, then go forth and shop. Just don’t blame us if you find
it all a bit too tempting…
Using Price Comparison Sites
Many price comparison websites aren’t quite
as useful as they sound and are apparently more concerned with getting listed
retailers extra traffic than pointing consumers at good deals. However, that
doesn’t mean they can’t be a useful tool in finding the lowest prices.
The
15 Best Price Comparison Sites.
The cost of computer components can
fluctuate wildly due to the instability of material and wholesale costs. That,
combined with fiercely competitive price wars between online retailers means
that a metasearch is often your best bet at finding the cheapest place online.
Performing price comparison on computer
products is a little trickier than comparing things like books or DVDs. If a
price looks too good to be true, it usually is - probably because someone has
made an error when sending their prices to be listed. Perhaps a 1GB graphics
card has been accidentally listed alongside its 2GB line-mates. Maybe a
retailer has mistakenly listed its prices without VAT. Or it could be that the
price of an online retailer’s postage and packaging actually bumps the price up
past its rivals once you actually visit the website and start to go through the
process of buying an item. Even with these potential pitfalls, though, if you
look around a price comparison site, you should be able to find who is selling
the product you want for the best price.
To check which site offers the best
results, we’ve tested a few popular examples looking for the best price on the
popular Ivy Bridge CPU the Intel Core i5 3570K. Here are our results: Google
Shopping / Product Search (www.google.com/prdhp) offers a no-frills service
that should let you identify quite quickly who has the cheapest price for any
given component. The listings are presented with and without postage, and while
it’s not perfect (there are a lot of dodgy-looking retailers on board…), it’s
quick to use and easy to read, and that makes it a valuable tool for anyone
looking to save a few quid.
The best price for the Intel Core i5 3570K
on Google Shopping was $206 (with P+P). Although the site did reflect that
price, the listing came from the retailer ‘UniPrice’, which we’d never heard
of. A quick search of it name showed that the company appears to be the subject
of many recent online complaints about unprocessed refunds and a lack of
received items. Indeed, no one has confirmed receipt of anything they ordered,
so, er, Google Shopping isn’t much help there. The site did return 168
retailers in total, but most of them were vastly more expensive than Amazon,
which is where most people would look by default. Still, at least the variety
is there.
Kelkoo has a much smaller range of
retailers and a generally higher quality of listing, although the site is much
more commercial than Google Shopping, which makes finding the best deals that
little bit more difficult. The graphics heavy site also means it takes longer
to load and browse pages. On the plus side, the retailers seem a lot more
reliable and the products are better organised, so that has to count for
something.
The best price for the Intel Core i5-3570K
on Kelkoo was quoted as $259 (with P+P) for the retailer WAE+, out of a total
of 19 results. Unfortunately, clicking through to the site revealed that the
item’s price was actually $259. A minor difference, admittedly, but one which
meant that the next cheapest price (Amazon UK’s $259) was cheaper. However,
when we clicked through to that, we found that it was for the Core i5-3570
(without the K) which is a different model. The next listing, which is actually
for the right CPU, gives a price of $270, so as it turns out, Kelkoo did get us
to the cheapest price first time, even though it wasn’t the price it actually
quoted on its site. Close enough, we suppose…
Kelkoo
has a much smaller range of retailers and a generally higher quality of
listing, although the site is much more commercial than Google Shopping, which
makes finding the best deals that little bit more difficult.
PriceRunner is similar to Kelkoo in being
much slicker than Google Shopping, and it has a similarly organised directory
of hardware and software for more casual browsers who aren’t entirely sure what
they want. We skipped straight to the search box, though, and matched the CPU
we were after straight away.
The best price for the Intel Core i5-3570K
on PriceRunner was quoted as $259 (with P+P). As you may have noticed, that was
the same listing seen at Kelkoo, from the retailer WAE+. Unlike Kelkoo,
however, PriceRunner had the right value on its site in the first place. It
returned even fewer retailers (only 15) but, on the other hand, it didn’t have
any erroneous results like the other sites did.
With that in mind, we can recommend
PriceRunner as the clear winner here, based on this product alone. We’d
recommend using a combination of all three sites to look for deals, but if you
only use one, our experiences suggest it should be PriceRunner.
