“TypoHound generates common misspelled variants of the keyword. This allows you to find the elusive 'toshia' listing. Since no one else can find the auction with eBay search to bid on it, you bag yourself a bargain!”

http://www.typohound.com/

FIND E-BAY BARGAINS QUICKLY

     GET IT NEXT thinks that its system is easier and quicker to use than the normal system. You can also use their “find a deal search” to locate items with zero bids and less than four hours remaining.

http://www.getitnext.com/

MPIRE.COM

     MPIRE.COM was one of Time magazine’s top 50 websites for 2007: “This is a shopping search engine on steroids. Not only will it give you a list of links to where to buy that 32-in. LCD TV, if you click on Show Product Details, it will display a pricing chart that shows whether the price is trending up or down, at both retail and at auction, so you can decide if it's the right time to buy.” (FARECAST.COM does the same kind of thing with airfares.)

http://www.mpire.com/

FIND BARGAINS ON AMAZON

     JANGLE.NET brings together the best buys in all the areas covered by AMAZON. Find them here:

http://jangle.net/

PRICE GRABBER

     PRICE GRABBER says it “is the industry innovator in online comparison shopping. Millions of consumers use PriceGrabber to quickly obtain free and unbiased information about products, services, merchants and sellers before making a purchase decision.” If you scroll down to the bottom, you will see, under “Lists and Alerts,” that you can also “receive an email when a product's price drops.”

http://www.pricegrabber.com/

PRICING CENTRAL

     PRICINGCENTRAL.COM is another good site. It helps you search through one bargain search engine after another. PRICINGCENTRAL “indexes all the best price search engines and online shopping bots into a comprehensive directory to help you find the right price comparison shopping agents each time you shop.” It involves more work than MPIRE, but you may find it gives better results with big-ticket purchases.

http://pricingcentral.com/

DEALING ONLY WITH TRUSTED MERCHANTS

     If you want to deal only with trusted merchants, let’s go back down a level or two, to some “old-fashioned” bargain sites. I checked out both YAHOO SHOPPING and GOOGLE PRODUCTS, asking about my favorite low, low-tech item: teapots. Each site offered thousands and was happy to arrange them according to price. Both offered remarkable bargains. Google had photos of most teapots, Yahoo had photos of many. And both offered merchant reviews. That way I can pick a specific merchant to mail me a specific teapot AND find out how other customers have been treated by this merchant. You see, the SANS Internet Storm Center,

http://isc.sans.org/

which tracks hacker attacks worldwide, says that merchants who are low bidders at bargain sites may steal your credit card information. The best selection is a low bidder with an established reputation. Both YAHOO and GOOGLE, in common with other big bargain sites, allow you to see what other purchasers think of a merchant before you buy.

http://shopping.yahoo.com/

http://www.google.com/products

     And if you want to investigate a product thoroughly, just scroll down to the section of this archive called “Find The Best Consumer Product Reviews.” Because the Internet offers in-depth consumer information.