The Web is a total godsend for those of us who don't or won't drive. I routinely buy all my new books, CDs, pet food, airline tickets and electronic equipment from the web.

There's a learning curve on shopping this way, though. Here's some quick observations from a year or two of on-line shopping. Incidentally, I don't have a financial interest in any of the sites I mention here. They're just services and stores I've used and liked.
 

In general, if you have more time than money you're best off checking two types of sites before going on a shopping spree: portals and coupon pages. Portals are sites that introduce you to a raft of web stores and secure you a discount if you enter the store from their site and use an email address that identifies you as affiliated with them. It's easy to register and getting a discount of between five and ten per cent is common.

There are more and more portals around, so it's getting more and more confusing and time-consuming to work out what the best possible deal is. I realised I was spending an uneconomical amount of time just to save a couple of bucks on an order, so now I just use bizrate.com. They have deals with a large number of good stores and their website is well designed and easy to use. What's more, they rate sites according to customers' experience shopping there, so it's sort of a People's Consumer Reports site.

Coupon sites are where you find little extras that can save you five or ten bucks on an order. This is where you find out the code you need to use in your order to get the freebies that various companies are offering. Again, there are dozens of coupon sites on-line nowadays. I use A2Z Deals: you can get some real savings from looking them over. Plus they have links to some stellar deals, like an Epson colour printer for which I paid less than $70.

Books
 

I heartily recommend Best Book Buys, a comparitive book-shopping service. It's a free service and it's saved me a bundle.

Here's how it works. Enter your zip code or postal code, specify the book you want, and Best Book Buys will create a list of how much it will cost you to get the book from about thirty major on-line bookstores. The list it generates goes from cheapest to most expensive, and prices quoted include shipping charges. Just click on the store you want to deal with, and the page comes up with the book you want already identified. (Amazon rarely if ever comes up in the top five for price, by the way).

I don't recommend eCampus.com, and looking at their reviews on bizrate, most of their other customers don't either. I routinely ignore them. They claim to have just about any book I'm looking for second hand at an amazing price. Oddly enough, they have always "just sold" the book, but have it new. Oddly enough, they then find out they've "just run out" of their new stock, but can order it...

Pet Fud
 

(By the way, I miss The Far Side. Gary Larson's books are easily available and highly recommended. This is probably my favourite Larson cartoon of all time, along with the one of the polar bears discussing how much they like igloos because they're "crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside".)

Shopping for pet fud on the Web is a joy.  Prices are way below what you pay in specialty stores, and it's easy to establish a regular order for staples so you don't have to spend time mousing around after the first time you place an order. However, since I'm the world's oldest impoverished graduate student, I routinely check to see who has the cheapest food, biggest discount and lowest cost shipping. I've had good experience with all three of the stores listed below. Each has delivered what was ordered, on time and at exceptionally good prices:

• pets.com
• petstore.com
• petopia.com

Miscellaneous Stuff

Music:

Very limited luck with buying classical music on the Web so far. I do not recommend CD Now: I've ordered from them twice and they've screwed it up four times.

I'm going to try Tower Music or Barnes & Noble next. Stay tuned for how it goes...

Perfume:

There are some great deals out there: I'll never pay full price for perfume again.

Just be careful. Parfumsraffy.com, aka Parfums4you.com, sells testers. It does say this on their web page, but in tiny print not easily read by sweet little old ladies like me. The bottle I received had about an eighth of its contents missing and a spray mechanism that doesn't work properly: Parfumsraffy claimed that that the problems all came from the handling during shipping and said they would replace it. Then I never heard from them again.

Groceries:

This is a major hassle. Ordering seems to take hours and prices are just as high as convenience stores more often than not. I grab my trusty bundle buggy and walk to the local store: it's no more time-consuming and it's healthier. Plus I can use my coupons there.

Airline Tickets:

Good deals are to be had, but it's time consuming to find them. Bear in mind that name-your-price ticket places like priceline.com do not include airport taxes in the prices they quote. By the time you factor those in you can find that you're paying close to what you'd have paid if you had bought directly from the airline.