The service will be initially available for books CDs and movies but DealPilot CEO Elisabeth Schick said the company hopes to double the number of categories it searches in the next few months. Since the company's founding by two students as a book search site in July 1997, the market has exploded.
Shopping bots are now a standard feature on most portal sites.
Competitors like MySimon allow users to search hundreds of categories, while companies like Frictionless Commerce use decision trees to help users decide what to buy. But that shopping cart feature will not be available in the initial rollout of the browser-based version. Schick, who worked in corporate development for Bertelsmann before coming to DealPilot, said the company will be able to rely on support from its parent for marketing, but said the product won't be influenced in any other way. Media firm Bertelsmann has both book publishing and book sales arms. Here's what you can do to purge it.