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Half the challenge of holiday shopping is figuring out what to get. The other half is figuring out how to get it. Not long ago, the choice was simple: the mall or downtown. But these days, even if you decide to shop online, you face myriad choices. There are all kinds of ways to shop and all sorts of tools that supposedly make the job easier. Which are best? I decided to try as many as I could. There are, I discovered, at least eight ways to buy a digital camera.

Why a digital camera? No reason; I just wanted one. Had I been looking for a rice steamer, my method would have been much the same. The camera I sought was to be of respectable quality (around 2 megapixels, which is above average but not state of the art) and should cost no more than $500.

1. The Easy Way

The first path I took was the one of least resistance — Amazon.com. As soon as I did, I remembered why I like this site so much: it offered a wide selection of cameras and an efficient way to search for them. Amazon also allowed me to line up my various candidates for purchase and view them in side-by-side comparisons. Other sites may have this comparison feature, but I have yet to encounter one that's as thorough and lets the user view as many choices simultaneously. I was able to compare price and technical features and also see how many customers had reviewed each camera. The prices seemed fair. Amazon became the standard against which I would measure the others.

2. Searching the Stores

What I needed now was information, both about different products and about where I might be able to get a better price. So my next step was to find a good guide site. I chose two: CNET.com and DealTime.com. CNET is devoted to computers and electronics and assumes you have some tech savvy, while DealTime traffics in all sorts of consumer products. Both give you tools to make a smart choice, then use "shopping bots" to guide you to the most reliable store with the best price. A shopping bot is an online consumer's best friend. It will quickly search a bunch of stores and show you a list of everyone who is selling the product you want and the prices they're asking. But at CNET I was shown more than just prices; the list gave me a heads-up on how much shipping would cost, whether the item was in stock, and how many stars the merchant had earned from BizRate, an Internet consumer group. DealTime didn't give me shipping information, but it did show me how the camera was rated at Epinions.com, a consumer review site. It also displayed merchant ratings from Gomez.com. Because these sites carry advertising, skeptical shoppers may be leery of trusting them. But I felt I got enough raw data to make my own decisions. Both DealTime and CNET turned up dependable stores with prices that would have saved me a few bucks.

If you don't trust product recommendations from sites with sponsors, there are other bot sites, like Pricescan, that claim to be without bias. And even if you trust the other sites, you can still run a product through Pricescan's engine. Why not?

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