I’ve talked about Booko as the best place to buy books in Australia. For computer hardware and accessories, there’s staticice.com, a search engine that allows you to search for a computer parts across stores all over Australia and ranks the results by price. Unfortunately it doesn’t calculate shipping prices for you like Booko, but it lets you immediately find the cheapest in-store price. This is great for consumers because if this service becomes popular, then it puts pressure on computer hardware stores to compete in price resulting in lower prices.

I hope more of these price comparison search engines come up for different niches. Especially for the mobile phones market. It’s a mess in Australia with artificially complex price structures where call charges are much higher than the price you actually pay so advertisers can use phrases like, “pay $20 and get $80 of value”. It’s impossible for a consumer to compare plans across the mobile market, and mobile companies like it that way because they don’t have to compete on price.

UPDATE:

Commenters also mentioned www.shopbot.com.au, www.myshopping.com.au, www.myshopping.com.au, and pricecompare.com.au as good product comparison websites, although I haven’t used them enough to recommend them, so I won’t link them directly