All About Content

Wondering where to shop? eBay is the place to go find anything new and used, popular and obscure. The site boasts 168 million users with 60 million listings (including five million new listings per day). Nearly $1,400 worth of good are bought and sold every second. With numbers like these, eBay is often considered a barometer of consumer shopping trends (source). Shopping.com (an eBay company) also features a Consumer Demand Index to help you identify currently popular items.

But this holiday season, you might also want to try some other aggregator sites and/or marketplaces that will help you in your search for the perfect gift at the right price:

• For CDs and DVDs try Shopping.com (an eBay company) - With a pool of 60-plus online vendors for music and movies, this site ranks well on both availability and pricing.
• For electronics products, as well as jewelry, visit BizRate.com - Good search functionality and a clean layout make it easy to sort through brands and styles, as well as compare merchant ratings.
• Toy shoppers should try PriceGrabber.com - A site with one of the largest range of toy products. Create a “shopping agent” to notify you of price drops.
• For books, Amazon.com is an obvious choice but don’t stop there. If you want to do your part to support independent stores, don’t overlook Powells.com, which has a great selection and a money-back guarantee. Campusi.com, on the other hand, is an aggregator site that will help you find rare and out-of-print books from 50,000 different sources.
• Cell phones? Glad you asked. Visit Point.com for frequently updated “scoops” on new price drops of popular model wireless devices from online retail stores like Wirefly.com, Buy.com, Radio Shack and others. Wirefly.net also lists current best sellers, in case you need help picking a phone.

The first four recommendations come courtesy of Real Simple magazine.