The ultimate shopbots
Sean Brodrick

Shopping is such fun ... and frustration, long lines and fights over parking spaces. Glazed-eyed mobs sweat like sheep in a slaughterhouse as they shuffle through the malls.

If you're a smart shopper, you can avoid the hassles by plugging in, turning on, and using general-interest shopbots. These cybernetic shopaholics scour the World Wide Web to help you find the best prices on everything from cigars to shoes and Barbie dolls. Let other crazed consumers battle over a parking space. You can do all your shopping in a couple of hours without ever lifting your well-padded American rear end out of your comfy chair.

"Everyone should use shopbots," says Marcus Zillman, chief executive officer of Bot Technology Inc. in Marco Island, Fla. "Like Nike says: 'Just do it!"

In our continuing series, Bankrate.com has told you about shopbots that are best in finding deals on books, movies and music, and shopping agents that ferret out bargains on computers and peripherals. Today, we're talking about general-interest shopbots. They can find just about anything under the sun.

A lot of shopbots didn't make the cut. Dealtime and PriceScan, two of our favorites, just didn't offer a wide enough range of products to be considered "general interest." Snap Shopping, Excite's Jango, Amazon.com zShops, Shopping.com and Storerunner didn't make our top five either -- better luck next year. Either their products were not varied enough or their layout was clunky and confusing. And to add injury to insult, in many cases they often got plain ol' beat out in price and selection.

Other factors we considered were:

• How much product information is provided?
• Do they search other shopping Web sites?
• Are items listed according to cost, or can vendors pay a fee for a higher-placed listing?
• Are there intangibles that make the site a pleasure or a pain?
• Do they list shipping costs along with the prices?

We looked for things that might end up on anyone's Christmas list and probably will end up on ours:

• Teva women's sports sandals
• Box of Dunhill Corona cigars
• Toshiba DVD player
• Tasco telescope
• Classic Furby
• Millennium Princess Barbie doll (on New Year's Eve, her head explodes. Just kidding!)
• Buzz Lightyear action figure with Flight Control

Many of these items are matters of personal taste. There are more expensive telescopes than the particular model of Tasco on our list, but we don't want to buy a $600 Meade telescope only to have Junior hang his underwear on it. And if you're looking for cigars, visit all of the shopbots here (except Bottomdollar, which inexplicably doesn't carry them) because brands and types are hit-and-miss on all the shopping agents. We wanted a Barbie for the girls, and for the boys, a Flight Control Buzz Lightyear.

If you're interested in different things, you might like different shopbots. We tried to review the shopbots with an eye to the general user, the person who wants to buy a variety of products on the Web but doesn't know where to start. Even with the following report card, we would not recommend you use any one shopbot. Instead, use two or three of them when you're searching for an item. This should guarantee that you get the best price.

It's important to note that not all of the shopbots in our top five had all of the items we were looking for. Sometimes they would list merchants, but the merchant would not have the item in stock. However, a shopbot that can not find a particular item often lists alternative items in that category. The price on the second chart is the price that the shopbot found at a merchant who had it available, not a lowball number from a vendor who did not have it in inventory.

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.

Finally, sometimes the shopbots came up with the same low price because they have duplicate vendors on their search lists. For instance, everyone but mySimon found the same great deal on Teva's women's sports sandals (on the other hand, mySimon consistently beat or matched the competition in other categories).

mySimon

mySimon is our best pick. With nearly 2,000 listed merchants, it also made our best shopbots list in our other two categories, making it the king of Internet Santa's helpers.

If you've read our other stories on shopbots, you'll see that mySimon gets a higher score in this category than it did in others. mySimon is not as sophisticated as some of the more specialized bots, but it rules the general interest category. Bots in this category don't have all the nice features that the more specialized bots do. Nit-picking aside, mySimon is a great bot, and is well organized enough to help you find just about anything.

It has an easy-to-use menu and if you need ideas it suggests presents. mySimon has guides that tell you about products and even help you decide the features you want.

mySimon's search function is extremely advanced. For instance, when searching for a DVD player, you can refine a search to include items you want and items you don't want. Not only can you put price parameters on the search, but you can specify what kind of credit card you want to pay with, what kind of shipping options you're looking for, and whether you want to avoid merchants that charge a re-stocking fee. Whew!

In the general interest category, mySimon was very competitive on prices, though it only listed shipping costs if the merchant included that information in the product description. A search comes up with merchants who pay a sponsor fee on the top. You have to click on "price" to get the list re-sorted by cost, and some users may not think to do that. At least mySimon gives you the option -- others in this category don't. Grrrr!

Webmarket

It seems that not enough thought went into the location of Webmarket's search window. You select one of Webmarket's well-organized categories on the main page and get the search window on the next page. You can hunt within categories, but, rather than put the search bar at the top of the page like everyone else in this corner of the universe, the geniuses at Webmarket put it at the bottom of the page. Unless you scroll down, you'll miss it completely. And that would be too bad, because despite its quirks, we really liked this shopbot. On telescopes alone, it returned 329 listings -- wow!

What's more, Webmarket's product guides include recommendations from Consumer's Digest and shopping tips, and you can sort search results by price, product, merchant and brand. It also often lists shipping and availability, but it doesn't rate merchants.

Bottomdollar

Bottomdollar features lists of quick searches and top sellers on its front page, which could help gift-challenged elves. However, this bot's categories are not as clear-cut as mySimon's. Telescopes are under electronics, despite the fact that the simple ones we were looking for are about as hard-wired as a pair of sneakers. Once you find the right category, you get a search window, and Bottomdollar does an adequate -- if bare-bones -- job of finding items. The search results sometimes have details like the model number and descriptions of the product ... and sometimes don't. You cannot re-sort the search by price. When you have a long list, that's just plain awful.

Humorously, a search for "Tasco telescope" returned only Meade telescopes. A more general search finally found the Tasco model we wanted on Netmarket, a service that has separate prices for "members" and "guests." Guess who pays more? The price shown in Bottomdollar's search was Netmarket's "member price." Since we aren't joiners, we'd have to pay the higher guest price. Still, the guest-price was fair -- which, in one word, sums up Bottomdollar.

Yahoo! Shopping

Yahoo aspires to greatness. We love that it has a search window on the front page, no wasted time digging through a category. Unlike Bottomdollar, Yahoo listed the Tasco telescope on Netmarket at the "guest" price, and we like that honesty. A search returns brief lists of merchants and available categories, and then, further down the page, a list of products. Here's the great part: Yahoo shows photos of the items. When you're hunting for something like a Furby, which comes in all sorts of colors, a picture is worth a thousand words from an advertiser. Yahoo also rates merchants.

However, you cannot re-order a search by price or anything else for that matter. When a search returned a lot of matches, all that scrolling through products and prices quickly lulled us into a shopping coma. Availability and shipping costs were never listed, and other written details are sparse. But it's still a good site and the best of the portal shopping sites.

Shop@aol.com

Despite the name, do not type Shop@aol.com into your Web browser's navigation bar. This will bring you to a page that is not a shopbot. Instead, type in http://www.aol.com/shopping. You choose a category and then get a search window.

Web address confusion aside, AOL's buyer's guides and gear guides are great for shoppers who aren't really sure what they want. When we were looking for our Toshiba DVD player, AOL linked to 800.com, which gave a very detailed description of the product.

AOL's shopping bot searches merchants along with Web sites like Amazon and Netmarket. The AOL search is a bit funky, but once you get the hang of it, it works well. When you search for, say, Barbie, scroll through the results until you find a button that reads, "widen search." This will bring up a thorough search with an impressive number of results. However, we didn't find the models we were looking for three times out of seven. AOL gives search results sorted by merchant. You can't re-arrange them by price, and this shopbot is a little stingy with information.

AOL had 89 kinds of Barbie dolls, including Millennium Princess Barbies from multiple merchants, and it had the best prices on this product to boot. But while there were plenty of Buzz Lightyear dolls, the "Flight Control" version wasn't among them. Dang!

So now you have Bankrate.com's top general interest shopbots. Use them wisely, and use more than one at a time. You will save yourself some serious money and a lot of frustration.

-- Posted: Nov. 25, 1999