Continuing our Thrift Week excursion thru the thriftiest sites on the Internet, we come to each other personal preferred of mine, ConsumerSearch. As regular readers will recognize, I genuinely have a private stake in this corporation, due to the reality that I'm actually certainly one of its normal writers?However I turned into already keen on the web page earlier than I began operating there. I first wrote approximately it on this weblog returned in 2010, and I don't think I can improve at the description I gave at the time of the manner the website works:
By the by, let me take a moment here to insert a plug for ConsumerSearch, an incredibly handy site that I would recommend even if I weren't working for them. Here's an example of how it works. Suppose you're shopping for, say, a TV set. Normally, you might start by consulting Consumer Reports to see which models they recommend. Then you might check a few other publications that have reviews of electronic items, such as Wired, to see if they agree with those recommendations. If you really wanted to be thorough, maybe you'd go to a site like Amazon.com or Epinions.com to see what users have to say about the model you're interested in: do they like it, or have they discovered problems with it that didn't show up in the professionals' tests? And finally, once you'd settled on a TV, you'd visit several sites to compare prices before deciding where to buy it.
Well, ConsumerSearch does all that be just right for you. We are seeking for advice from the excellent publications and the character evaluate websites, after which we report on what we discover there and make hints in severa categories; for a TV, the ones is probably differing types?LCD, plasma, and so forth.?Or precise sizes, or brilliant charge levels. You can click on a link to study more approximately the specific product that pursuits you and observe price comparisons from throughout the Web. Having labored on those opinions, I can attest that they are very thorough; it takes me approximately 30 hours of labor to research and write one, but it pleasant takes about fifteen minutes to study it and characteristic the whole thing set out properly for you. And when you have even a great deal much less time than that to spare, you may study virtually the the front web page, wherein we choose out the pinnacle merchandise, with a paragraph about every one laying out its execs and cons.
I expect this is a really splendid device for the ecofrugal, as it permits you spend your money accurately (and shield the environment at the equal time thru selecting products to be able to last, rather than desiring opportunity after a 12 months or so). ConsumerSearch reviews do not generally attention specially at the
Actually, that second paragraph is a bit out of date, because ConsumerSearch changed the format of its reports last year. The full report on any given topic is now much shorter, with just a single paragraph on each top-rated product. However, within that paragraph, you'll find a link to a separate page that covers that product in much more detail, analyzing its features, durability, and anything else you're likely to want to know about it. (Here's an example from last month's report on cookware.) So it now takes even less time to read the full report, but if you want to know more about a specific product, you can take a few extra minutes to read about it in more detail.
These days, Brian and I wouldn't even think about making a major purchase without consulting ConsumerSearch first. Checking this site was our first step when shopping for our camera, for Brian's bike, for our microwave, and even for our car. It's helpful for smaller purchases, as well; when I decided to try a new facial cleanser, for instance, reading through a report to find the best choices was a lot easier, and a lot less costly, than going through every product on the shelf until I found one I liked. And we've also used ConsumerSearch when shopping for services, like pet health insurance for our cat.
Unlike Freecycle, this isn't a site you need to sign up for. You can just go to the main page,http://www.consumersearch.com/, at any time and type in the product you're looking for. ConsumerSearch covers a huge range of product types, from electronics to kitchen knives to power tools, so no matter what kind of major purchase you might have on the horizon, this site can help streamline your search.
[UPDATE, September 2018: Sadly, ConsumerSearch is no longer being updated. The site is still available, but you'll find no content more recent than June 2018. If you're looking for a new site to help you comparison shop with less work, try Wirecutter.]
