Bot News
StoreScanner

By Brian Proffitt

There are several ways to skin the proverbial cat, and like most businesspeople, shopping bot developers are going to try them all.

Community Vista Corporation's hook is the inclusion of local merchants within its search parameters for its new shopping bot, StoreScanner.

StoreScanner is just over a month old, and its newness shows when you enter the site. Right now, it appears that the number of merchants working with StoreScanner is on the low side.

The interface for the site is a bit lacking as well, particularly on the front page. Here, only a single search field is made available. You can choose whether the parameter for the field equals manufacturer, model, or description, but this only gives the field one of these attributes at a time. For instance, when I entered, "Panasonic DVD" in the field, which was set to Description, no products were found.

On the interior pages, however, a three-field box was displayed, that would let you enter information within some or all of them. By entering "Panasonic" in the Manfacturer field and "DVD" in Description, I was able to get 16 hits. If a similar interface existed on the front page, or if a better parser was used in the background, a lot of effort could be saved.

Even though the number of participating merchants seems a tad low, StoreScanner compensates by allowing you to include online auctions and group buyers in the search parameters. This greatly expands the variety of products you will see after a search run. I ran "CD Player" and got 47 hits, compared to an average of 32 hits for the same description on four other shopping bot sites.

Local merchants are also included in the search, but apparently my city has no participating merchants, so I was unable to see this feature in action. To fully utilize this feature, StoreScanner enables you to create a login ID and enter your address, so the search can center your location on the local merchant side.

While I typically a little leery about giving my address away on the Web on any site, I was very alarmed to see that this was not done through a secure server on StoreScanner. This, coupled with the fact that my login and password were mailed back to me in unencrypted form, meant that my address was vulnerable to getting grabbed. (I have since deleted it from my personal settings.)

Speaking of personalization, for the aesthetic minded, you can also set the look of the site to match one of seven schemes. Pretty, but not really helpful.

The information displayed from search results was clear and well-organized. Each product is listed with a picture and a small blurb of information, as well as the Low and Average price for the item. The searches themselves were very fast.

I especially liked the Compare feature, which lets users check off items they want to see in a side-by-side feature comparison, which is displayed in an easy-to-read table.

If you use the canned-search links from the front page, you will be presented a specialized set of search fields in which you can modify features for that item.

Users should be aware that sometimes prices are misleading for items being sold at auction. Typically just the Opening Bid is listed, not the Current Bid. This seemed odd, since the current Time Remaining information had been obtained.

In general, StoreScanner has the potential to be a good price comparison site, if it can tweak its interface for easier searches and increase its security for visitor's sense of well-being.