Comparison Shopping Made Easy

CEBU, Philippines – Of all the things that are in the advanced intelligence, shopping category, the one that we know works is price comparison because consumers do that already. You're not asking them to think some entirely new way about shopping. A lot of these intelligent agents, such as intelligent software programs that search for shopping information, are a little more complicated. When you try to see what people who are like you like, that's not typically the way we think about shopping.

But every time we shop we do wonder whether we're getting a good deal. It's very simple for people to say, "I want to buy this, show me what ten or twenty or thirty people are selling this item for." We see a lot of this on CNET. We have probably over 100,000 people a day who come in and do price comparisons on products from our pricing database, so we know that it works.

- from Fast Forward By Alfred C. Sikes with Ellen Pearlman (Morrow)