Hi. I’m James. I made this site for me but you can use it too.
I’m a primary school teacher. I made Shop Assist to help me with my Christmas shopping. It’s a very simple tool that searches lots of shops quickly using each individual shop’s own search system so that it is 100% accurate.
How to use shop assist
- Choose the category of item you are shopping for (top menu or from the front page).
- Next, type in what you are searching for into the search box.
- Click on a shop name to see if that shop has it.
(Hint: Hold Ctrl (Cmd on a Mac) and click to open the search results in another tab)
For example, if I wanted to find the best price for a Lego Minecraft End Portal set, I would go to the Toys page. Then I would type in my keyword to the search box (“Lego” would return thousands of results, “Lego Minecraft” hundreds and “Lego Minecraft End Portal set 21124” would only return a few).
Tell me more – why is this useful again?
Really? OK… I made this site because I always do the same thing when Christmas shopping. I always end up going to the same shops for my gifts. I don’t really want to buy from an obscure online shop that I’ve never heard of just to save a couple of quid.
I used to search each shop individually to see if they had what I was looking for and then buy from the cheapest. I know you can do similar things on other price comparison websites and get the results on one page, but to be honest, it’s never quite …100%, if you know what I mean. You don’t? Oh. Well, for starters, there’s always a shop that’s excluded (Google shopping doesn’t always return results from Amazon, for example). Or it’s out of stock at a particular shop (but that news hasn’t filtered through to the price comparison website). Or the price has changed in the last 24 hours. Or you can only do Click and Collect from their branch on the Shetland Islands. Or … do you get the idea?
No, I just want to find what I want using the shop’s own search system. So I do. But going from shop to shop took too long. So I made this site and, to be honest, it has been absolutely life-changing – no exaggeration.
People who say “no exaggeration” are always exaggerating, aren’t they? It’s not life-changing. It has made Christmas shopping easier though.