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Net Prophet - by Dylan Tweney

December 8, 1997

Shopping agents help consumers find the best deals


Most of the internet-commerce technologies covered in these pages have focused on the needs of online merchants: commerce servers, transaction-processing tools, shopping carts, and the like. That makes sense for the first wave of I-commerce products: Merchants are the ones with the biggest budgets, so most software vendors have been concentrating on developing products to sell to those with the cash.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Internet merchants aren't the only ones that stand to gain from online shopping technologies. The Internet creates some very interesting shopping possibilities for consumers, who -- at least in theory -- now have the ability to comparison-shop with a few clicks of the mouse.

For consumers to really exercise this power, they will need shopping tools. And that's part of what the second wave of commerce products will provide. Whether they're called agents, shopping software, or something else, what these tools will have in common is that they will give shoppers more power to find -- and buy -- the goods they want.

In October, search site Excite acquired shopping agent vendor Netbot, whose Jango shopping search tool was one of the vanguards of this second wave of commerce products. By the time you read this, Netbot's technology should be incorporated into Excite's shopping channel, at http://www.excite.com. Excite has given its newly-acquired shopping agent the windy name of "Excite Shopping Search, powered by Jango," but don't let that turn you off. Excite Shopping Search (call it ESS for short) will do something very useful and seemingly simple: It will automate comparison-shopping for anyone with a Web browser.

One-click comparison shopping

ESS, which has been converted to a server-side application running on Excite's site, will let visitors to Excite enter a search for, say, the latest Garth Brooks CD, and get quotes back from a host of online music stores. You will be able to do the same when shopping for books, computers, and travel products, too; eventually ESS will be incorporated into all of Excite's shopping categories.

Interestingly, this makes Excite's shopping channel -- which until now has been pretty much a collection of storefronts with only a little information about what is in them -- something of a giant superstore. Not only can you find the kind of online store you want with Excite, but you will be able to zero in on the very product you're after. If you're shopping for a computer, you will be able to submit the same configuration to a variety of manufacturers and get their quotes all at once, on the same page.

Will this comparison-shopping make merchants nervous? Not at all, according to Joe Kraus, senior vice president and a co-founder at Excite. As he sees it, Excite's shopping channel and ESS provide merchants with a place to display their wares. (Besides, ESS doesn't focus only on price comparisons -- there are other things customers may want to compare, such as service contracts, shipping, gift wrapping options, and the like.)

Right now merchandising on the Web is sadly out of step with the real world.

"Shopping on the Internet is like walking down the street and all the storefronts are boarded up," Kraus tells me.

You said it, Joe. How can I window-shop on the Web if each store I visit requires me to wade through five or six introductory pages of content, menus, and advertisements before I can look at products?

Or, to coin another analogy, shopping on the Internet is like walking down a dark alley, entering each store in succession through its back door, walking down a hall plastered with posters advertising the store you are already in, riding an elevator to a different floor, and finally arriving at the department you are interested in. Then you have to repeat the whole process with the next store.

Kraus aims to change that by turning Excite into an, um, exciting collection of retail storefronts, all of whose goods are visible and accessible to potential customers. In other words, Excite will no longer be the back alley through which you sneak into Web storefronts, but, if Kraus gets his way, a virtual Main Street for the Internet-shopping district.

Will it work? Would you use a service like this -- or, if you are a merchant, do you welcome consumer shopping agents? Write to me and tell me what you think.


Dylan Tweney edits InfoWorld's Focus on I-Commerce section. You can contact him at dylan@infoworld.com.


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