Webware

I love things that save me money when shopping online. While PriceGrabber and Google Shopping are my two go-to sites for finding the lowest prices on electronics, tons of sites track prices and give the heads-up when something goes on sale or gets its price reduced.

There's also PriceAdvance, a browser plug-in that will pull up competing prices from other online sellers automatically whenever you hit a page with a product and price on it. Its latest iteration for Firefox and IE doubles the number of prices it shows you compared with the previous version.

Right now it only works on 16 major online retailers including heavyweights like Amazon.com, Buy.com, and Wal-Mart. For non-supported sites I'd recommend going with a service like Retrevo (review), which pulls in the prices throughout the day and includes a listing of product manuals--just in case you don't feel like hunting around for the spec sheet.

I've embedded a demo of it in action below.

Other cool price tools:
Use the Web to watch for price drops
Pricepinx intelligently watches for price drops online
Tjoos: Somewhat smarter shopping

One of our favorite sites, the airfare prediction site Farecast, is spreading its wings today and launching a beta pricing service for hotels as well. The service works for the top 30 U.S. travel destinations.

Using hotel inventory data from partner sites Orbitz, Cheaptickets, and ReserveTravel, as well as from its own historical database, Farecast can now tell you which hotels in the area you're looking to book are good deals, and which are not. And, just as it does with airfares, Farecast can tell you which hotels' prices are likely to be better if you change the dates of your stay.

Step 1: Find the red hotels at your destination. Those are the good deals.

Farecast displays hotels that match your search on a Microsoft-powered map. Bookings that are good deals (reservations that cost less than they normally do for the particular hotel) are color-coded in red. Poor deals are in blue. If you click on any hotel, you get a graph that shows how the hotel's prices fluctuate over the days before and after your trip.

Step 2: See if your hotel's prices are better before or after your planned dates.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

It's interesting that Farecast doesn't color-code by price, but rather by amount of discount from the historical average. Thus a $400 booking can be a better "deal" than a $200 hotel--however, the high-priced lodging is likely to be at a five-star hotel, while the cheaper room can be found at a lower-quality location.

The system will let you know, visually, if you're traveling at a bad time. If all the hotels you're looking at are bad deals, there's a good chance that there's an event in town that's driving up prices. Farecast also has data about local events, Farecast's Mike Fridgen told me, but it doesn't display this information in this beta.

This new hotel price-finder feature is quite useful, and Farecast does an extremely good job of displaying its data and predictions. I would recommend using it for your next booking.

(The one thing I really would like to see added is integration with Farecast's airfare system. It'd be even more useful if the site could combine airfare and hotel info to help you pick the best dates for a trip. That's on the road map, Fridgen said.)

Somewhat related: Rentometer (review) and Zillow (previous coverage).

CrispyShop is a new tool for comparison shopping. Launched last week, CrispyShop lets you search and compare prices and specs for pretty much anything sold online, using visualization that's both useful and easy on the eyes. CrispyShop is built on ShoppingPath, a technology that visually sorts and separates search results. All results come from Yahoo Shopping, and provide users with direct links to purchase products from popular Web shopping sites like Newegg and Buy.com.

Search results show up in a scatter plot, with product thumbnails that magnify when you mouse over them, similar to the dock on Mac OS X. It's a really neat effect that's actually fairly useful for getting a ton of results in a small space. Even cooler is the capability to tab back and forth between both selected products and comparison options without refreshing. This is especially helpful when comparing computer monitors, as you can check the screen size, resolution, and response time without having to go to individual product pages.

CrispyShop is not without a few flaws. If you want to search for prices on a single product, you'll have to specify what category it falls into. I'd like to see a simple search box (like Google) that doesn't require having to pick from the 25 genres to aim the search tool at what you're looking for. Also, the individual results don't always give you the kind of depth you can get from sites like Newegg or Epinions. There are user reviews, but you'll often have duplicate search results, some of which have reviews and others that don't.

CrispyShop is a useful tool for looking at a lot of results at once. The lack of a real shopping community or user profiles keep it from being a group experience; but as a direct comparison tool, CrispyShop does a good job of making things easy.

See also BrowseGoods for neat shopping visualization.

(Credit: CNET Networks)