'Tis the Season to Be Thrifty

Thi

s may be the season for giving, but that's no reason to let retailers rip you off, especially online. Whether you're an old hand at Web shopping or one of the many Americans trying it for the first time this year, you should always check out at least one price-comparison website before you buy.

If you haven't looked at the shopping bots in a few years, you're in for a pleasant surprise. Instead of just finding the lowest prices, they now rate the merchants they search, so you will feel a little more confident about buying that $1,000 camcorder from a site like Love4Digital.com or BestDiscoCam.com. Key details like shipping costs and whether a product is in stock are often displayed with your search results. And make sure you update your bookmarks: some of the most popular sites today--such as bizrate.com and pricegrabber.com--weren't even in the comparison-shopping business a few years ago.

Finding low prices is the easy part--and the one thing all seven sites I tested did well. What really distinguishes the good bots from the bad are their rating systems, breadth of offerings and ease of use. The decidedly inferior pricescan.com searched disappointingly few merchants in all but the electronics category and seemed to have trouble simply producing coherent search results. My overall favorite, bizrate.com, promptly found everything I wanted--from a bottle of Veuve Clicquot to the latest Palm computer. Because Bizrate's rankings for each site are culled from thousands of consumer surveys, rather than the handful per merchant found on many of the other bots (or none at all, at PriceScan and SmartShop), Bizrate also made me feel the safest about shopping online. The on-time delivery rankings are especially handy for last-minute shoppers. About the only thing missing were shipping charges--features my second favorite sites, dealtime.com and mysimon.com, usually provided. (The ratings on those sites, however, weren't as complete.)

If you think you know what you want to buy but could use a second opinion, epinions.com is worth a visit. It's the only site that provides user ratings of both merchants and products. Unfortunately, the product selection is a bit on the slender side. It doesn't cover clothing or food, for example. And while the site's user recommendations convinced me that it was O.K. to buy the cordless screwdriver I had been eyeing, not a single merchant is listed that sells it.

There are a few tricks to remember when using these sites. Keep in mind that the lowest price doesn't always mean the best deal. Shipping costs, which aren't always displayed, can quickly eat up any savings. And if a discount merchant has a poor rating or doesn't have the product in stock, that low price flashing onscreen will do you as much good Christmas morning as a lump of coal in your stocking.

Questions for Anita? You can e-mail hamilton@time.com