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Let's Find a Deal

As e-tailers focus on the bottom line, bargains are getting tougher to find. Luckily, tools for tracking them down at online stores are becoming more sophisticated, too.

The original generation of shopping bots-- MySimon.com, Evenbetter.com (now part of DealTime.com), Mygeek.com, and some others--required shoppers to launch a browser and type in the name of a product, after which the Web site returned a list of sites that sold the product, along with the price each charged. The newer bots--including Clickthebutton, Dash.com, IChoose, and RUSure--are desktop applications that you download, install, and run in the background. When you peruse an item at your favorite Web store, these deal finders alert you to lower prices elsewhere. To put them to the test, we shopped at Amazon.com for a scanner, software, a DVD movie, and a book.

Better Bots

Though not the flashiest of the bunch, Clickthebutton was our favorite. Its 2-minute download time is among the fastest, it doesn't ask you to supply personal information, it searches some 400 stores, and overall it saved us the most money. For instance, it found a DVD version of The Thomas Crown Affair for just $14.48 at Sam Goody versus $17.49 at Amazon. Savings were even more dramatic on the Epson Perfection 1200U scanner: $177.15 at Buy.com, compared to $232.94 at Amazon. Clickthebutton.com lists BizRate's rating for each merchant; its prices reflect taxes, and it shows separate totals for different shipping options.

In most cases, Clickthebutton delivers its search results automatically in a pop-up window while the product is visible on screen. We were required to type the name of the scanner into the desktop application, however.

RUSure hunted down the Perfection 1200U at Avnetdirect.com for $187.74, only $10.59 more than Clickthebutton's bottom-dollar price. But it told us Amazon's price for the DVD movie was the lowest available. RUSure takes about 20 minutes to download, and it takes some time to search 700-plus sites for the product. The shopping bot performs price comparisons for 131 of those sites. When you open a product page at an Internet store, RUSure asks "Are you sure?" in a funky synthesized voice and displays its search results in ticker-tape style as they arrive. Like Clickthebutton, RUSure lets you search for an item manually.

IChoose works with large, popular retailers that have agreed to offer its users small discounts, coupons, or some other special deal, like free shipping. If a discount at an IChoose store brings its price below the one you're considering, the blue icon IChoose installs in your system tray flashes; you click on it to check the offer. As with RUSure, you needn't lift a finger once the program is installed. We liked the way IChoose fills out order forms using information you provide on setup, too. But IChoose found no prices lower than Amazon's for any item on our shopping list.

Dash.com's DashBar runs across the bottom of your screen as you browse, delivering weather information and search-engine access as well as a list of its 125 partner sites. As you look at products, the bar occasionally flashes a message about a related site's discount--but it's up to you to investigate the details. In its quest for our book, My Parrot, My Friend, Dash.com alerted us to a Barnes & Noble offer that cut $1 off the $20 price--far above the $7.95 Clickthebutton and RUSure found at Allbooks4less.com. All four new bots work with Internet Explorer 4.0 or later; Navigator and AOL support is spottier. We noticed no drag in our system's performance.