Another Way to Get the Best Price this Holiday Season

Posted by Mike Smith :: November 23, 2007 @ 6:41 am

Online price comparisons have been around for quite some time. Services such as Google Product Search (formerly known as Froogle), Shopzilla, and Amazon have long allowed consumers to find the best price of nearly any product or service. While I strongly recommend using such a service before making any purchase, all of these services lack one feature desired by the average consumer: portability.

You want portable price comparisons because you’re often at a store where an item is on sale when you’d like to compare its price. While smart phones and portable Internet access devices do solve this problem to some extent, not everyone has the latest devices, or wishes to pay for premium data access services. While there are other ways to access some of the data (such as through text messaging to Google Product Search) a new service provides a more complete solution that everyone with a cell phone (or within reach of a pay phone) can use for free.

The service is provided by Frucall. It’s been around since last year but is really gaining in popularity of late. What makes it work so well is that it incorporates all three of the cell phone access methods: mobile web, text messaging, and voice. The last access method is the big differentiator, since as I mentioned earlier, text and mobile web access are available at other sites.

So how does it work? Let’s say you’re at the store and see a great price on a product that you’re interested in buying. By calling Frucall (1-888-DO-FRUCALL or 1-888-363-7822) and entering the UPC for the product (or ISBN code for books), they’ll read a list of available prices from online retailers. You can also enter your zip code to get prices including shipping. There are other options as well, such as purchasing the item, but that’s not really where I see the value of the service. Preventing you from overpaying for an item because you don’t have comparable price information is the real problem that Frucall solves.

Just as we recommend using P2P loans from Lending Club when looking for an affordable financing source, we want you to get the best possible price for other products and services. Especially around the holidays, when every penny counts, using a price comparison website before you go shopping is a smart move. For any items that you haven’t researched before heading to the stores, using Frucall, or a similar service, is an effective way to ensure that an apparently “great deal” really is.