Chapter 12: Electronic Business Project:


Using Intelligent Agents for Comparison Shopping

You have decided it is time to supplement your old film camera with a new digital camera, but you do not know what to purchase. So, prior to buying one, you want to find sites that review digital cameras and explain them. Begin your search using a popular search engine. Certain sites, such as Imaging Resource, also enable you to see the quality of the photographs, which is necessary for you to make your final choice. Several other sites, such as dpreview.com or dcresource.com enable you to compare features and prices. Having read material on the cameras and compared the quality of the photographs on these sites, select a digital camera you might want to purchase, such as the Canon PowerShot SD-10 or the Fuji FinePix S310.

           You would like to purchase the camera as inexpensively as possible. Try several of the shopping bot sites, which do the price comparisons for you. Visit mySimon (www.mysimon.com), BizRate.com (www.bizrate.com), and CNET.com (www.cnet.com). Compare them in terms of their ease of use, number of offerings, speed in obtaining information, thoroughness of information offered about the product and seller, and price selection. Note that with some of the shopping bot sites, you are able to sort the results by model number or price by clicking the column title. Which site or sites would you use and why? Which camera would you select and why? How helpful were these sites for making your decision?