Shop Intelligently

Shop Intelligently

Use Yahoo! Shopping to find and compare products across the Web.

Shopping is more of an art than a science. Finding the right item at the right price involves a bit of intuition and luck. But there's no reason you can't bring a bit of science into your shopping habits to help you find, compare, and buy. Imagine you're interested in purchasing a portable music player, but you're not sure which to buy or where to buy it. You could physically drive to your local electronics stores and browse, but you'd miss out on the benefit of choices beyond what they have in stock and you wouldn't have instant access to information about each of the products and their differences. You could browse to your favorite online stores, but you'd only find prices at each individual outlet.

Just as Yahoo! brings together thousands of news sources at Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com) and millions of web pages at Yahoo! Search (http://search.yahoo.com), Yahoo! Shopping (http://shopping.yahoo.com) indexes merchants across the Web to find prices for thousands of products. Instead of typing portable music player into Yahoo! Search and sifting through hundreds of results to find online stores, you can search or browse Yahoo! Shopping and see prices at merchants that Yahoo! has approved. In addition to finding and comparing prices, you can add items from multiple merchants to a wish list and compare product features side by side.

Find

There are several ways to find products at Yahoo! Shopping, whether you know exactly what you're looking for, want to browse from products available, or want suggestions for special occasions.

Searching.

Type portable music player into the search form at http://shopping.yahoo.com, and each result will be a specific product. You can click each result to see more product details and compare prices across different merchants, or you can select several results and compare differences in the product features. The search form is also handy if you already know the product you're looking for.

You can click the Advanced Search link next to the search form (or point your browser to http://shopping.yahoo.com/search/advanced) to narrow your search results to a specific product category or price range.

Browsing.

If you don't know quite what you're looking for, you can use the categories on the left side of the Yahoo! Shopping home page to narrow your search. Or browse directly to http://shopping.yahoo.com/directory.html to see a list of all categories, as shown in Figure.

Browsing categories at Yahoo! Shopping

For example, you can browse to the category Electronics and select the subcategory MP3 Players to see links with more information about players, lists by brand, and a list of the top five players. Browsing for products gives you a few more options along the way than simply viewing a list of individual products.

Gift Finder.

When you're shopping for someone else, it can be hard to come up with ideas. Yahoo! Gift Finder (http://shopping.yahoo.com/giftfinder) will give you product suggestions based on information you provide in a short questionnaire. Browse to the Gift Finder, choose an occasion (birthday, wedding, specific holiday, etc.), and then answer several questions about the gift recipient. The Gift Finder will give you a series of options to look through.

SmartSort.

SmartSort (http://shopping.yahoo.com/smartsort) is a tool that lets you specify the importance of different product features and returns a list based on your criteria. At the time of this writing, SmartSort supports only electronic gadgets, but it can help you decide which gadgets to buy. Say you're interested in digital cameras and are most concerned about a compact size. You can specify that criteria in SmartSort and see a list of possibilities, as shown in Figure.

Comparing digital cameras with SmartSort

Internet Explorer users will see sliders at the top of the SmartSort page that they can adjust to affect the results, while users of other browsers will see a series of radio buttons.

Product feeds.

Yahoo! also provides RSS for various product categories, and you can see a full list of feeds available at http://shopping.yahoo.com/rss. If you're not quite ready to buy a portable music player today but want to keep your eye on the market, you can subscribe to the MP3 Player feed and see new products in your newsreader or at My Yahoo!.

Compare

As you're browsing or searching products, you can check the Compare box next to many products and then click the "Compare side by side" button at the bottom of the page. This will show you the selected products together on one page, with a list of features compared. Figure shows two digital cameras side by side.

Comparing two digital cameras

Once you've found a product you're interested in, you can click the product title to visit the product detail page. Figure shows a product detail page for a 20GB iPod.

An iPod product detail page

The product detail page provides links to more information, such as specifications and reviews. But most importantly, it prices across different merchants. You can scan the page to find the lowest price and view merchant ratings.

Merchant ratings at Yahoo! Shopping are based on the reviews of Yahoo! users. If you've had a positive or negative experience with a merchant listed at Yahoo! Shopping, you can click the "Write a review" link to add your own rating and comments for that merchant.

When you're ready to buy, click the Buying Info button to leave the Yahoo! Shopping site and visit the merchant's page for that product. From there, you can follow that merchant's procedure for buying the item.

Save and Share

Another unique feature of Yahoo! Shopping is the ability to save products from many different merchants to a single shopping list. Instead of maintaining multiple wish lists across different sites, you can store the items at Yahoo! Shopping by clicking the "Save and Share" link next to any product listing. Once an item is on your wish list, you can keep tabs on the price and add your own notes about the product, shown in Figure.

Saving products from different merchants to a wish list

And, of course, it wouldn't be a wish list if you couldn't share it with others. Click the "Email your listings" link at the top of the page to send an email like the one shown in Figure.

Sharing exactly what you want with others means you can get exactly what you want the next time a special occasion rolls around.

Yahoo! Shopping won't make the art of finding the perfect item obsolete, but it can help you make informed choices by showing you what's available, by comparing the product with similar items, and by letting you share the products you've found with others.