Jim Karpen Tips

Internet agents help you shop

December 1999

Everyone wants low prices, and those little Internet elves can help you. Called shopping agents, they've recently have started to become really useful.

The concept is simple: a search engine that lets you type in an item and then searches the Internet to find who's offering that item at the lowest price.

If you're looking for computer hardware and software, the best site seems to be CNet's shopping service. For my test search I tried the Nikon Coolpix 950 camera, which is selling on Amazon for $849, well below the list price of $999. CNet found dozens of vendors and a price of $762, lowest among the shopping agents that I tried.

PriceScan is another good agent, though not quite as easy to use as CNet. Unlike the others, this site relies on humans as well as search agents, and includes vendors that are not online. Here you can find the lowest prices for books, music, video games, movies, and computer hardware and software. A search for the Nikon Coolpix 950 at this site returned the largest list of vendors, with a low price of $769. While not as low as CNet's results, they had a much larger selection of vendors in this lowest price range.

An excellent agent for finding the lowest price on books is AddAll.com, which searches 41 Internet-based book merchants. This site is unusual in that it compares the total price, including shipping and any applicable sales tax.

The search agent that that I found to have the widest range of merchandise was MySimon.Com. A search for the Nikon Coolpix 950 found dozens of vendors, though the lowest price in this case was $782. But MySimon has so much more. If you don't know what kind of digital camera you want, MySimon offers a handy tutorial, explaining all the various features. Once you learn the details, then you can go through a series of checklists and indicate which features are important to you. MySimon then makes a recommendation on the basis of the features you specified.

MySimon offers everything from apparel to toys, including items for home and office. I searched for a pair of khaki pants, and this is where MySimon really impressed me. I can almost never find pants in my size, but within minutes MySimon found vendors with just what I'd been looking for. Its search engine was flexible and effective. If you register, MySimon will send you price updates.

Outletzoo.Com isn't a search agent, but is a new site that contains closeout items. The price is constantly going down until all the items are sold. You have to decide how long to wait before you jump in. Right now they just have PC items, but will soon be expanding into other areas.

DealTime is a comparison shopping service that offers price tracking: you can tell what price you want to pay, and they'll keep looking until they find that price. If you download their Personal Notifier, then you'll be instantly contacted when a vendor meets your price.

All in the great search for the lowest price. As we go slouching toward the millennium, there is a revolution at hand. More than ever before, information about price will be universally available.

Price is, to me, magical. I marvel at how it transcends the individual and somehow represents an aggregate of individual decisions and desires, and serves as a medium of communication, motivating manufacturers to produce more when price (and demand) is high, and lessening the incentive when the price falls (indicating oversupply). When price is manipulated, say the free-marketers, then the mechanism doesn't work so well.

Price, I feel, likes to be free of boundaries, to cross national borders at will, to be unfettered by good intentions. And a main limitation price has had on its ability to communicate freely has been the speed of communication and the accessibility of information. Now the Internet is changing all that. Every market everywhere is becoming part of one large marketplace.

In a sense, the marketplace is like an organism, in which the flow of information among all the parts is essential. My belief--and hope--is that this free flow of information about price will create an ever more vital organism.

© 1999 by Jim Karpen, Ph.D.