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GroceryGuide: Local food deals and sales database extraordinaire

Now here's a Web app that could save you money on something you're bound to be doing on a weekly basis: buying food. GroceryGuide takes all the data from weekly grocery sales circulars and makes them available online in one large database. Similar to some of the aggregation sites that do this with electronics deals, you can either browse by store, or create a list of three items you'd like to search for from up to two different local stores at a time. If you find an item you like, you can then add it to a … Read more

How sustainable is Black Friday?

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, kicking off the 2007 holiday-shopping season...apparently in full force.

As you are probably aware, Black Friday is the term in the U.S. for retail shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving, and Cyber Monday refers to online shopping on the Monday following Thanksgiving.

These have become milestone shopping days that retailers use as indicators for the health of the holiday-shopping season. While they are often referred to as the busiest or even biggest shopping days, they are quite often trumped by other days leading up to Christmas.

Retail, probably more … Read more

Snoopr does Digg for deals

Snoopr is a new site with an old idea. It lets people submit deals they've found on all sorts of things from consumer electronics to food items. These items go into an upcoming feed, where others can "snoop" them up. What really makes the site stand out is its aesthetic, which serves up a clean and simple interface with a few goodies like a percentage marker that lets you know how much you're saving off retail, and a simple rating system that shows what other Snoop members think of the deal. Together the two give you … Read more

Study: Retail sites hit with sluggish performance

Which would you choose during the holiday shopping season: a long line at the local Costco warehouse store or an average download wait of 115 seconds per page on Costco's e-commerce site?

During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, a third of the 30 Web sites that Keynote Competitive Research monitors during the holiday season showed a significant drop in speed. Online shoppers, despite using high-speed connections, faced up to 2 minutes to process their e-commerce transactions, compared with the 1- to 2-second blip most are accustomed to, according to Keynote, which released its report Tuesday.

Traditional brick-and-mortar retailers that … Read more

Gifts you can't unwrap

If a holiday season free of wrapping paper and ribbons is on your wish list, there are many options for giving presents without touching anything but a computer and credit card. Services that can be ordered and received online also can be more eco-friendly than physical presents. Of course, you could always funnel funds directly into someone's PayPal account, but where's the fun (for you) in that?

That's entertainment

Netflix offers gift subscriptions from $9 for one month of movie rentals to $108 for one year. GreenCine's rental certificates for indie film buffs start at $44 … Read more

Holiday Helpdesk Deals

The Holiday Help Desk really is about helping. And that means helping you save money too. Once an hour during the help desk we got special deals from Shopper.com to announce. Just some ways of saving money on gadgets to say thank you for hanging out with CNET. So take a look below for the details on our shopping deals.

Desktops CompUSA -CompUSA.com has the HP Pavilion a6200n for $559.99, after a $50 mail-in rebate, plus free shipping. Regular price is $609.99 Sale price is $559.99 Savings $50 Offer ends 1/5/2008

Car Tech … Read more

Holiday Help Desk live on Friday, November 23

Join CNET TV on Friday, November 23 for the Holiday Help Desk our live, 10-hour call-in show. Whether you need advice on software, games, electronics, gadgets, computers, or anything else technological under the sun, experts will be answering your holiday tech shopping questions live from 8 a.m. PST to 6 p.m. PST.

Call 1-888-900-CNET with your questions on Friday or e-mail them in advance to holidayhelp@cnet.com. If your call is answered on the air, you'll be entered into a drawing to win one of eight Nintendo Wii Holiday Mega Bundles valued at $600. Included in … Read more

Gadget blog and upscale NYC department store--a match made in heaven?

According to the PSFK blog, Manhattan's legendary luxury department store Henri Bendel is so notoriously old-school that it launched its first Web site a month ago. But the retailer is moving a step further into the Digital Age by opening a holiday gadget "pop-up store"-- curated by bloggers--inside its Fifth Avenue space.

Last year, Bendel had a holiday shop centered on the youth-oriented mobile phone carrier Helio.

But for 2007, Popgadget, which caters to female readers who appreciate both style and function and is staffed by a team of writers around the world, has selected an … Read more

Oodle 2.0: More intelligent classifieds shopping

The classifieds aggregator site Oodle has just launched its 2.0 version. While the underlying functionality hasn't changed, the site got a good design refresh and now presents more relevant data to the user. And, of course, its database of crawled sites continues to grow, making the results more relevant.

As before, Oodle does some semantic analysis of your search query when you go looking for an item. If you type in "Toyota Sienna," Oodle knows it's a car, and on the results page lets you narrow your selection down by model year, color, mileage, and … Read more

Just tell me what to buy

Recommendr, a new social shopping site, mimics the Q&A feel of a company community message board.

You throw a question up on the site and hope that someone more knowledgeable than you--or someone who has already been through the experience and done the research--has a shortcut or answer to your latest consumer dilemma.

Users can ask or answer a question on any topic concerning a consumer purchase. Recommended items range from household cleaners to watches and include links to where you can buy a product. Users' rating are based on points. They are given five points for every … Read more