Shopbots Article Discussion

Jack_Carter

I like the idea of shopbots, though I just want to mention an experience I had.

I was looking for a Garmin Forerunner 405. A shopbot recommended Pegasus Fitness, who offered the item £5 cheaper than the nearest competitor, so I ordered online.

Two weeks later I get an email saying they were out of stock, but they didn't give a date for delivery nor a time window. So I decided to call them up to ask about this, yet got an answering machine several times. I emailed them and two days later they said they would refund.

A week later I still hadn't received my money back. Upon contacting my bank, I found out that Pegasus had not even put in an instruction to refund. I have asked my bank to chase the funds whilst emailing Pegasus to escalate the matter.

So shopbots are great, though sometimes it is worth paying the extra few shillings for reputable service.

If anyone else has offers of advice I'd love to hear them.

KittaKatta

I'm with Rpoints and, even though it may not be the highest payer, in only a few months I have saved around 100£ for things I would have got anyway through some comparison sites.

brev

http://www.bizreveal.com is great as it combines a comparison shopping engine with cash back discounts.

UK cash back websites don't have effective comparison shopping engines, and the effective comparsion engines don't show prices with cash back discounts, however bizreveal.com does a great job of combining both. You can easily compare prices on a product after cash back discounts have been applied at the different rates available from various merchants.

The site also compares prices from online retailers that don't offer cash back rebates, ensuring you are truly getting the best price available. I have found that some major internet retailers listed on bizreveal.com sometimes offer better prices than retailers with cash back offerings, up until now you could not easily see this as there was no website that properly combined both services.

bike_mad

I use a site called cyclecomparison (.com) when looking for cycling stuff. Pretty good comparison site.

thorntpm

Just a quick note: I just realized that if you have one-click settings turned on for Amazon.co.uk, you are likely to be charged for shipping EVEN IF the item says "this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery." This is because there is no default setting button in One-Click for Super Saver Delivery, your only options are "first class" or "express delivery." I only just caught on to this, after having purchased at least a dozen items through "One-click" and thinking that I was getting free delivery. The convenience of "one-click" just cost me about £30 this year alone!

digiRich

In these expensive times myself and my wife find ourselves spending hours comparing prices for things for our new baby. Someone told me about ukbabystores .co.uk today which finds baby products from dozens of major retailers online. You can then find the cheapest price...
Does this count as a 'ShopBot' then? The site doesn't actually sell anything....

lilolilly200

I think comparison websites are excellent. You can just go to the one site and run a quick search to find the cheapest price. Some of them though are not all that good as they don't list very many retailers. I like to use http://www.shopseekers.co.uk because I think they list more retailers than most of the others do.