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Shopping bots are one of the neatest things about online buying because they can compare prices at different online stores instantaneously. At either mySimon or DealTime, you'll be able to pick an item you already think you want and check the price at more than 2,000 stores, using mySimon, or up to 7,000 stores, using DealTime. In my testing, they both did a good job turning up bargains and usually found the best ones in relatively remote corners of the Web, where most people otherwise wouldn't look. From finding a $25 book for $13.50, as DealTime did when I looked for a copy of Business Week economics editor Michael J. Mandel's The Coming Internet Depression, to clobbering the price offered at group-buying site Mercata.com for a Palm handheld, as mySimon did, you can almost always get a deal with a bot. And unless you're a total Web junkie, you've probably never heard of tiny sites like doublediscount.com and Abe's of Maine, where these buys turned up. If I could only use one of these bot sites, however, I'd use DealTime. It's not just that DealTime works with more stores, although it apparently does (on this point, I'm taking the companies' claims about their roster of stores at face value). It's that DealTime has done a better job of organizing everything else about the site to help surfers narrow their choices in oft-bewildering categories like consumer electronics and appliances. Because the real key to Christmas or Hanukkah or even Kwanzaa isn't just getting the right price: It's getting the right present in the first place. TEMP HELP. DealTime's secret weapon is a clever mix of software utilities that mimic the sales process you would encounter in stores. Focusing on areas like stereos, DVD players, and cameras, DealTime's "Interactive Advisors" guide surfers through their choices, narrowing the field based on users' answers to questions about the features they need and the prices they want to pay. Along the way, I learned how to decipher the code of specifications about digital cameras for the first time, to name one example. It's a big flaw that this utility only exists for a few categories of gifts, leaving out biggies such as computers and fitness gear. But it's still more than mySimon offers. MySimon, which is owned by CNET, suffers this year from the demise of its former partner, Productopia.com, which used to provide detailed reviews and recommend products in different categories at different price points. Instead, mySimon is aiming for a sort of consumer-magazine approach, in which a staff of writers and editors present their picks and gift recommendations. But the project has an undisciplined, half-finished air to it, kind of like a salesperson who has just been hired for the holiday season and doesn't really know the merchandise. There's nothing on mySimon anymore that leads a consumer through a new category and narrows the choice in a disciplined way that leads to a confident buy. Both sites, really, offer too little information about the products their partner stores sell. The ideal would be to have one place to go to for solid, if self-interested, advice about the choices consumers face -- such as what you'd get at a store in the mall or by the highway -- coupled with the price-finding capability of a bot. DealTime offers that only in the few categories covered by its online-adviser questionnaires. Both sites also offer user reviews -- mySimon from its own users and DealTime via links to Epinions.com -- but I don't take user reviews terribly seriously, especially on more complicated, expensive goods. SAFE SHOPPING. Both sites, however, do well at reassuring customers about the relatively unknown stores whose prices they present. Both DealTime and mySimon accompany each price quote with the stores' ratings from Gomez Advisors, which rates the reliability of e-stores. Fear that a cheap store won't deliver the goods on time? If other surfers have panned the store to Gomez, you'll have the information and can choose to pay a few bucks more to another outlet with a better track record. Everyone from Wall Street to Main Street is waiting to see how e-commerce does this season: Is it Nirvana, just a big con, or somewhere in between? At mySimon.com and Dealtime.com, you won't be served eggnog or smooched under the mistletoe. But you'll find almost anything sold on the Web about as cheaply as it can be found -- and beat the Big Friday crowds to boot. Mullaney covers e-business for Business Week from New York |
