Shopbot

A shopbot is a special type of webbot. I also can be call as shopping robot, it can be use it to check prices with many retailers on the webbot. Shopping bot are comparison shopping web sites that help consumers find the best offered by online retailers. Shopping bots operate in similar way to search engines. This bot like software can send out on a mission, usually to find prices from different online store and report back to the user, so sometimes user called it as a intelligent agents

Type of Shopping Bot

There are two general types of shopping bots. The first is the broad-based type that searches a wide range of product categories such as MySimon.com and PriceScan.com. These sites operate using a Yellow Pages type of model, in that they list every retailer they can find.

Evaluating Shopping Bots

Even the best bots can't provide guarantees for finding the lowest price or search all retailers. Consumer advocates recommend evaluating prices found by at least three shopping bots before making a purchase.

Some bots are biased in what they report to consumers and give preferential treatment to their marketing partners. Results given to users may only be from retailers that pay a fee to be listed, so users may never learn about bargains from reputable low-cost sellers. Some bots sort prices so that the results from their marketing partners always appear at the top, rather than sorting by lowest price.

Helpful Shopping Bot Features:

• Easy navigation
• Well-organized results
• Sorting by total cost (including shipping, handling, taxes, and restocking fees)
• Prices from a large number of retailers

References

Gregg Keizer, PCW Print Web shopping: Bots and beyond, Retrieved November 28, 2001 Retrived in

URL:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/34799/web_shopping_bots_and_beyond.html

David Dinning, What are spiders& Web Bot?, Retrieved July 16,2011

URL:

http://www.ehow.com/info_8745233_spiders-bots.html