Shopbot, an emerging technology, has proved to be a boon for online shoppers. A shopbot searches a number of online catalogs for a product on behalf of the shopper. Shoppers not only reduce the search time significantly but also help the shopper to get a better deal. The article describes the role played by a shopbot in an online buying process, major shopbots active on the Internet and some issues with existing shopbots. It concludes with the hope that the next generation shopbots will be able to replace the human element in the buying process.

The popularity of Internet has grown in an exponential way. The number of people buying, selling and performing commercial transactions on the Net is growing at a phenomenal rate. Internet has evolved from an information space to a market space with thousands of electronic stores, auctions and other commercial services. You might have shopped sometimes on the Net. What do you do to buy a product or service? You log onto a search engine and put a keyword relating to the product. The search engine then looks for the product based on the keyword and may give you thousands of hits. After a good deal of surfing, you find a few stores that actually sell your desired product. You may then proceed by comparing the price, model, delivery, vendor reputation and so on manually. This is a time-consuming work and good offers may be missed. Another problem may be that the best search engine necessarily covers only a part of the Internet. Shopbots have made it a lot easier to find and compare offers from online catalogs available in Webstores.

The shopbot technology has created hype for last couple of years. It has come a long way in remarkably short period of time. The word shopbot is the short of shopping robot. On the Web this robot has taken a new form of life. A shopbot is a program or service that eases your shopping in Internet malls. It places you in the driver's seat by allowing you to easily decide which merchant offers the best deal for your desired product or service. With the advent of shopbots, a dramatic reduction in search cost seems imminent. It promises to radically alter the market behavior.

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