The e-commerce market is booming tremendously with great thanks to major companies such as Amazon and eBay who have hit US$14 billion and $8.5 billion in revenues in 2007 respectively. Most of us buyers would simply head to these sites and purchase what we need. Let’s say you want you buy a digital camera. If you’re not a photography geek, then you would just pick any model or brand that complies to the features you need. However, searching for the most “value for money” one seems quite difficult.

This is when an intelligent decision-making tool comes in handy. Known as Shopnics, it helps “to simplify the shopping experience and help making buying decisions faster” by enabling online buyers to compare electronic gadgets in terms of prices and other options.

It makes use of an impressive algorithm which choose the product that is “value for money” when you’ve selected your preferences like price, resolution, LCD screen size, optical zoom and digital zoom (different gadgets don’t have the same options). You’re then presented a visual graph with the dots representing each brand. From the graph, you can easily conclude that which one is the better decision.

However, there are some downsides using Shopnics. They include limited categories. When I first visited the website, I was surprised to found out that there are only 8 of them and I feel that the folks there should include sub-categories to refine users’ search results. But at least the search somehow helps to ease the problem a little and the cloud tag allows us to view the most popular searches.

In conclusion, Shopnics is simple to use and comes in useful when we simply can’t find which products are worth the money to purchase especially when we are currently suffering from the global economic downturn.