WIRED NEWS, STORY TODAY, "USING BOTS TO BUY BOOKS':
wired.com
Using Bots to Buy Books
by Jennifer Sullivan
5:04am 14.May.98.PDT
All the marketing dollars in the world might not
help the Amazon.coms of the Web, or even the
Barnes & Nobles of realspace, if so-called
"shopping bots" hit the big time.
Available through sites like Yahoo's and Excite's
shopping guides, shopbots search a multitude of
online retailers to find the lowest price on a
specified product. They are often derided as
"bottom fishers," but bot-backers are betting that
online shoppers are primarily interested in one
thing: the very lowest price available anywhere.
Though shopbots abound for computer products,
clothing, and flowers, they may be best suited for
the online world of books. Muenchhoff & Janz
GmbH's Acses Web site( acses.com ) is picking up steam after
signing its 25th book retailer in February. Acses
links into the databases of all its book sites,
searching for your title. It returns the top
selections, ranked by price, along with shipping
and handling information, while linking to the
respective Web sites.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is that it's not always
the well-knowns, like Amazon.com or B&N, that
have the best deals. Frequently, it's the little guys
like All Direct Books, that can get you David
Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest for only US$15.16.
"Very often, lesser-known stores are cheaper, e.g.
All Direct Books," said Christoph Janz, who
co-founded Acses in 1993 with Christopher
Muenchhoff, in an email interview. "The long-term
consequences of comparison-shopping agents ...
for the online retailers are not rosy."
And boy, are the little guys excited. "It's the best
way for us to compete," said Michael Kelm of
alt.bookstore, which is also featured on Acses.
"People will choose us because of the price. We
don't have the millions of dollars to spend on
content that the Amazons do. This is a really good
equalizer."
The Acses service is not perfect -- shipping time
and pricing can be a bit off, and certain links return
messages like this: "Booksite Books is not yet
cooperating with Acses." But Acses is indicative
of an online business model that might soon take
hold. And shopbots are something the analysts at
Jupiter Communications love to talk about.
A Jupiter study released Friday found that 77
percent of buyers go online with a specific
purchase in mind, and 79 percent of them visit
several sites before making a purchase. Thus,
Jupiter trumpeted shopbots as the wave of the
future, because they greatly cut down on time
spent comparison shopping.
Plus, shopbot services are free to consumers, but
still allow for a profitable revenue stream.
"There are two revenue sources," said Ken
Cassar, an analyst at Jupiter Communications.
"One is through [bookseller] participation fees
[that] some of them do not charge." Cassar said
most, if not all, shopbot sites also receive
additional commission fees for sales generated
through their site.
But Acses has one problem. "They can't offer
merchants the masses of traffic or the quantity
that the portals can offer," he said. "It's harder to
say no to traffic coming from a portal."
Indeed, Janz said the site has not garnered much
attention yet. But it is one of the few book
shopbots that hosts more than a handful of
sellers. Some portals, like Yahoo's ShopGuide,
only host a few big book players, while others only
let you search on one bookseller -- Lycos
searches Barnesandnoble.com and Excite
searches Amazon.com. Most analysts said that
this is because of their exclusive deals in the
bookselling category.
Excite, Yahoo, and Amazon could not be reached
for comment.
But so far, the big booksellers like Amazon.com
and Barnes & Noble have allowed themselves to
be included in Acses, Yahoo, and other little bots
like Best Book Buys and Shopfind, suggesting
that they are not overly concerned about diluting
their brands.
Indeed, there is the potential that all the brand
awareness that Amazon and others have been
fighting for may simply evaporate.
Janz believes that this is a very real possibility.
"One day, users will not say 'I am a customer of
Amazon,' but 'I am a customer of Acses,'" he said.
That's significant potential. Yet Cassar said that
often the portal sites' shopbots are hard to find.
"The fact [is] that they are not promoting shopping
bots heavily."
Although Net surfers are obviously willing to give
sites like CDnow and Amazon a shot, are surfers
that desperate for low prices? Ernia Dubois,
analyst at Dataquest, said that a price difference
of only one or two dollars may not entice someone
to try a new vendor.
Barnes & Noble spokesman Ben Boyd was
noncommittal. "Being that we were the first to
bring deep discounts to the Net, we feel
comfortable with our prices. There are a lot of
options for the consumer on the Internet." Boyd
added that B&N customer service will continue to
make the site a draw for book lovers.
Some analysts agreed that people would not buy
blindly from shopbots. "Commodities are bot
fodder, but I don't think anyone wants to relegate
all their 'shopping' to bots. Where's the fun?"
asked Larry Dietz, analyst at Zona Research.
"But merchants have to be careful," said Cassar.
"It is crucial that the customer feels they have
made a purchase from your site." He singled out
customer rewards plans and push advertising as
brand loyalty enhancers, as well as other offerings
like book reviews and additional content.
But he warned that the distinction between what a
shopbot and an Amazon offers is becoming blurry.
"If a shopping bot starts to offer [these services],
they will start to encroach. If they step on toes too
heavily, the Amazons will be willing to sacrifice the
traffic they would have gotten, in order to eliminate
a future competitor."
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