I love browsing shops when I don’t have anything in mind to buy but when I am in need of something specific I can find it a real headache. Since I’ve started blogging I’ve discovered some great sites that really help you search for and track down a specific item. I have 5 favourites and I thought I’d share them with you today :)

Shop Style

I love Shop Style! This site is AMAZING. I was blown away when I first discovered this. Shop Style is basically a search engine that allows you to search for products across hundreds of online stores all at once. You can specify price range, colour, brand, shop and sale/discounted items. It’s available in lots of different countries too. I use the Australian site which includes lots of local stores (like Myer and the Iconic) as well as larger international sites (such as Boohoo, Forever 21, ASOS, Nordstrom). You can create an account on this, favourite items, create lists, specify favourite shops and get sale alerts too.

The Find is a a similar site to Shop Style in that it searches across hundreds of online stores all at once and collaborates results into one simple list. The Find has some different stores to Shop Style and I usually get quite different results when I search there. Like Shop Style you can specify price range, colour, brand, store and many other things in regards to sales and payment. The Find has both a US based site and a UK one. It currently doesn’t have a way to search for internationally available items, so if you do live somewhere else you will have to sift through search results yourself to discover if they are available to you. I actually save a list of shops within my account that I know ship to Australia and then only search within those stores, which works really well.

Amazon is actually one of my favourite places to search for jewelry and accessories as it has such an amazing range of product. I was searching for earrings on there the other day and got over 300,000 results! It isn’t as great for clothing but I think always worth a look. You can get pretty specific with what you search for and I find it provides great recommendations on related items too. Most stores on Amazon have great international shipping and prices too.

Etsy is like one gigantic, worldwide marketplace that’s open 24/7.  It is absolutely the best place to search for unique, handmade and vintage clothing and accessories. You will get a ridiculous number of search results here (I just got over 1.7 million earrings) and really different sorts of things too. It’s easy to tweak search results in terms of price, colour and shipping destination. I think Etsy is particularly great for searching for specific gift ideas as it has such beautiful, one of a kind items.

I’ve had mixed success on Ebay and don’t tend to shop there unless I have have something specific in mind to search for. I’m not exactly sure why as they have such an incredible range of things and the prices can be ridiculous (I think it’s the whole auction thing that stresses me out a bit and the fact you can’t easily return them). I’ve had some success finding items or sizes that I missed out on in stores when I was too slow making a decision or ones that have been discontinued – I really recommend it for that. Although I find search results a bit more patchy than some of the other sites here you can really find some unique, special items here (at a bargain).