However, there are concerns about bots traditional high bandwidth consumption and the practice by some bot sites of giving preferential treatment in product listings to companies that pay, rather than companies with the lowest prices or best features. Meanwhile, some merchants, worried about losing brand identity if consumers use bots and shop only by price, initially resisted inclusion in product comparison searches, according to NetRatings principal analyst Peggy O Neill. In addition, the marketplace competition created by shopbots has made it difficult for retailers to hold the line on manufacturers suggested prices, said Evie Black Dykema, consumer e-commerce analyst for Forrester Research, a market research firm. There were reports that some merchants initially blocked bots from spidering their sites, she said. However, O Neill said, vendors have begun to realize that shopbots could bring new buyers to their sites.
Bots have various uses.
For example, search engines use bots called spiders or crawlers to automatically traverse the Web s hypertext structure, retrieve documents, and create document indexes that the engines can consult in response to consumer queries. The first intelligent shopbot, called Bargain Finder, was developed to find the lowest priced music CDs in 1995 by Anderson Consulting. Some shopbots scour hundreds of Web sites for information. For example, mySimon works with just over 2,000 sites. Shopbots also known as shopping agents or recommendation engines currently use two methods to acquire the prices and other product information they use to provide their services.