Book, music and movie shopbots
Sean Brodrick

When you want to buy a book or music CD, you know the best deals are online. But which dot-com merchant will give you the best deal -- Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Borders, CDNow? Using a shopping bot, you can guarantee yourself the best deal by checking out these large-scale vendors plus a host of smaller, low-overhead stores.

For some time, savvy shoppers have followed a pattern: Go to a brick-and-mortar bookseller to browse through the latest publications, then scurry home like weasels to buy the books at huge savings from online merchants.

Oh, like you don't do it!

"I go get my cup of coffee at Barnes&Noble -- I love their coffee, and then I go home and shop with one click at Amazon.com," confesses Marcus Zillman, chief executive officer of Bot Technology Inc. in Marco Island, Fla.

Now, shopbots have taken this one step further. Whether browsing at a brick-and-mortar store or at Amazon.com's Web site, when you know what you want, you can save a lot of money by using an online shopping agent, or shopbot. These Internet bargain hunters let you search dozens of Web sites for the lowest price at the click of a button.

Bankrate.com's E-commerce exposed has scrutinized a host of shopbots to find out which are the best for buying books and music. We found out if they were easy to use, if they listed the lowest prices, and if they listed shipping costs on the same page. We also measured intangibles, including how much information they gave on the products, if they listed products according to cost or were biased toward vendors that paid a fee. We also wanted to know if the sites were a pleasure to use or a real pain. Were these sites we'd be comfortable recommending to Mom?

In the process of finding the best deals on books and music, we also found some great deals on buying movies. We also discovered that the shopbots that get you the best deals on books, movies and music are also the best shopping agents of any kind. They are simple to use, and they deliver all the details you need to know.

Tough choices

There are so many good book and music shopbots that this is the toughest category of the three we'll be reviewing. There are a lot of book and music shopbots that didn't make the cut for one reason or another. Their searches were too slow or the information returned was too ambiguous, or they didn't return enough merchants for comparison. Sometimes, they were good, but just not as good as the top five in this category. Shopbots that fell short included e-Compare, A1BookMall, Bottomdollar and BookBlvd.com. They all could use improvement.

One last point -- we find it ironic that shopping agents devoted to finding books should all mangle the English language. DealPilot, PriceSCAN, BestBookBuys, mySimon ... have you ever thought of putting proper spacing or capitalization in your names? Oh well. The English teachers among us will just have to grit their teeth and think of savings when they use these first-rate Internet bargain hunters.

Our list shows the prices we found on one day. By the time you use these shopbots, prices may have changed, merchants may have sold out of or re-stocked missing items, and new items may have been listed.

DealPilot

Even though DealPilot limits itself to books, music and movies, this is the best damned shopping bot on the planet. It's the E-commerce exposed's best pick for book, music and CD shopbot.

DealPilot used to be called Acses, but the new moniker is both more pronounceable and descriptive: If there's a deal to be found on a book, CD or movie, this shopbot will ferret it out. And it is SO user-friendly.

There's a search bar right on the front page -- no tedious hunting through categories with DealPilot. On the next page it asks for your location so it can compute shipping charges. It also gives detailed information about the subject of the search, sometimes including commentary. Then a button starts the price comparison and in 20 seconds, there's a list of merchants who have the product in stock. The items are returned in order of total cost. Each listing includes total price, the shop (merchant) selling the item, the base price, discount, taxes if applicable, shipping costs, shipping time, shipping service and delivery time. Whew!

After you pick the listing you want, it brings you to the vendor site. Our one complaint is that on some of the books in our test, PriceSCAN and BestBookBuys beat DealPilot's price.

Not only does DealPilot deliver the details shoppers need, it also knows what to leave out. The site is very uncluttered and easy to use. I'd feel comfortable telling my mom to use it. Kudos to the folks at DealPilot. If only all shopbots were this good.

PriceSCAN

Along with books, music and movies, PriceSCAN searches for computers, electronics, office equipment, sporting goods and video games. You choose a category on the front page, and it brings you to a search bar.

When it comes to finding books, music and movies, PriceSCAN is like a stripped-down version of DealPilot. On a book search, PriceSCAN returns with the following information: Vendor, book price, shipping method, shipping cost and total cost. But for movies and music, PriceSCAN won't tell you the shipping cost! It wasn't until after we had clicked through to Buy.com that we found out our $13.99 copy of Treasure of the Sierra Madre would cost $3.95 to ship. Grr! Plus, PriceSCAN inexplicably didn't list one of our target films, Good Will Hunting.

However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't use PriceSCAN. We suggest you use it along with DealPilot. Even adding in the shipping for Treasure of the Sierra Madre, PriceSCAN's total price was a buck cheaper than DealPilot on that movie. On other books, DealPilot was just as cheap as or cheaper than PriceSCAN. While PriceSCAN may not have all the great details of DealPilot, its expanded categories, high number of merchants searched, low prices and better-than-average features make it worth a look.

BestBookBuys

This shopping bot's motto should be: "I only do books -- but I do 'em well." It doesn't search as many stores as PriceSCAN or DealPilot, but it still manages to find rock-bottom deals. The information is returned in the following format: bookstore, sales tax (if applicable) item price, shipping (carrier and approximate cost) and total cost.

BestBookBuys doesn't include the detailed information or commentary of DealPilot. But it has a clean, easy-to-follow layout, and it searches for deals on textbooks. If you're just looking for books and you know exactly what you want, this is a great site.

BookFinder.com

This is a shopbot that's so different from the rest of our top five that it definitely deserves a mention. BookFinder proves itself useful by scanning bookseller databases to find used, rare and out-of-print books. And it returns a list that tells you if the books are first editions, if they're signed or have other notable points of interest. If you want to get someone a truly unique book, this is the shopbot to use.

On the minus side, though BookFinder says it will find new books, it doesn't find the best price. But hey, we have four other shopbots that will do that. BookFinder doesn't list shipping costs on most of its selections. Anyway, if you're looking for a signed first edition Steven King, you probably don't mind paying a little extra for shipping and handling.

In fact, we could do a whole story on rare book shopbots. If you want others to compare to BookFinder, try bibliofind or alibris. They were both close runners-up to BookFinder.

mySimon

To paraphrase Charles Dickens: mySimon is the best of bots, it is the worst of bots. This is a general-interest shopping search agent -- you can use it to buy everything from soap to cigars. It does a decent job of looking for book, movies and music. And mySimon's search function is extremely advanced -- in movies, for example, you can tell it if you're looking for VHS, DVD or laserdisc, new, used or rental and much more.

In fact, the choice of menu options lets you narrow or expand your search better than any other bot we've seen. mySimon has great menus, it suggests hot items for gift-challenged Santas, and there are guides to help new users. This site has reviews, author biographies, and cover art, along with merchant profiles, which tell you if the vendor accepts returns, and if there's a re-stocking fee. This is a feature we'd like to see on every shopbot.

But then the bad news: mySimon's prices were often beaten by our other bots. Sometimes you can get shipping costs on a book, sometimes you can't. Most of the time, we did not get shipping costs on the movies and music CDs we searched for. Worst of all, the list of search results is not returned in order of price. Instead, mySimon allows vendors to show up at the top of the list in return for a fee. As my saintly Irish grandmother would say: "That's cr-r-r-rap!" Luckily, you can re-order the list by price or total cost just by clicking on those words at the top of the list.

So now you have Bankrate.com's top five book, music and movie shopbots. Use them wisely, and use more than one at a time, and you should save yourself some serious bucks when you make your entertainment purchases.

-- Posted: Nov. 23, 1999