Finding Cheap DVDs Online: DVDPriceCompare.com
Written: Aug 30 '02
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I started buying DVDs in the heyday of the online bargains. I frequently paid $5-6 for DVDs and rarely paid more than $10. Including the shipping. These days I usually end up paying a few dollars less than the going retail rate, hardly the same level of bargain. To make sure that I'm getting movies as cheaply as possible I use two DVD price comparison sites - DVDPriceCompare.com and DVDPriceSearch.com.
Both sites offer price comparison services. Both sites list coupons and specials from online stores. Both sites try to provide the best prices available to their users. That said, the two sites offer slightly different features and generally come up with different "best deals". Although DVDPriceSearch usually (but not always) comes up with the better price, DVDPriceCompare still has a lot of useful features for anyone buying DVDs.
What DVDPriceCompare Has to Offer
In addition to price comparisons for specific DVDs, DVDPriceCompare lists the latest coupons and specials from various online vendors. They also list their 20 best sellers, their hot deals, and have an our picks section for specials they feel are particularly interesting. They also have a section specifically devoted to Disney DVDs and offer a weekly mailing list that sends out notices of hot deals.
Price Searching
The main reason to go to a site like DVDPriceCompare is to comparison shop. To search for the best price on a movie just enter all or part of its title in the search box at the top of every page and hit enter. You'll get a list of matches, each with a checkbox on the far right. Check the one you want, hit Compare Prices, and you'll get a table with the various stores across the top with prices below. The prices are linked to the pertinent product page at the relevant stores. By default the table won't show shipping or tax information; you have to enter a location for that information to show up.
If you search for another movie at this point, your present movie is discarded. There's no sense of history or of multiple DVD orders at DVDPriceCompare. You can't explicitly exclude or require the inclusion of any stores.
There is one way to see more than one movie at once, although the movies are listed in separate tables. If you do a fairly general search you can select more than one of the returned results to view. However, this really isn't useful - how many movies containing the word "winter" are you likely to buy at once?
General Bargain Hunting
DVDPriceCompare has a lot of coupons for a lot of DVD sales sites. The coupons are well organized by store and easy to find on a separate coupon page. Their hot deals and our picks are very easy to navigate, although I'd check any prices given there against DVDPriceSearch before making a purchase.
Database Issues
DVDPriceCompare adds new stores and new DVDs to their database regularly. They add them quickly, much faster than DVDPriceSearch. If a new cheap store is out there, DVDPriceCompare will often have the cheapest prices until DVDPriceSearch catches up. They also often have movies in their database the other site doesn't, making it the only game in town for those movies.
The pages load very fast and the search is also quite fast. I've never had any problems with performance at the site.
Look and Feel
DVDPriceCompare is a nice, professional looking site. Everything is well-organized and there's plenty of whitespace. The site packs a lot of information onto its pages without ever looking busy. As I mentioned earlier, there is a search box at the top of every page. There's also a set of navigation buttons on the left side of each page allowing you to go directly to the coupons page or to the new release or the other sections mentioned above.
All of the tables are somewhat sparse in design. They generally don't have cell borders and there's generally a lot of room between cells and rows. I find their tables very easy on the eyes.
They have very little advertising (other than the store logos in the price comparison tables), just one banner ad at the bottom of most pages. It's very unobtrusive and the ad is usually related to DVD shopping in some way.
DVDPriceSearch vs. DVDPriceCompare
DVDPriceSearch offers a much more robust price comparison service than DVDPriceCompare. It allows you to retain multiple movies and get prices for all at one; DVDPriceCompare does not. It automatically adds shipping; DVDPriceCompare does not. However, DVDPriceCompare is a bit faster at adding new stores and new movies so you can sometimes find deals there that you can't find at DVDPriceSearch.
DVDPriceCompare is a lot easier on the eyes and offers a more compact price comparison table. You can almost always see the entire thing at once, whereas you generally have to scroll for at least part of the DVDPriceSearch table. However, this is less of an issue than you might think since DVDPriceSearch puts the lowest prices on the left side while DVDPriceCompare does not.
DVDPriceCompare generally has more coupons and better coupons that DVDPriceSearch. It also often has better deals and specials, although DVDPriceSearch tends to list more of them. On the other hand, DVDPriceCompare does not let you browse by price or by discount nor does it show you a list of movies that are cheapest at any given store.
I use both sites. I use both sites almost every time I shop. However, most of the time, DVDPriceSearch offers me the best deal on the DVDs I want to buy.
Recommended:
Yes
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