another travel shopbot

Here is another travel shopbot, Cheap Flights Services, it help you check lowest fares from other travel shopobots. It doesn't search the airline companies or even other travel shopbot at all. Instead, it popup a window and transform user queries into each specific travel shopbots.

Comparison shopping for Limo service

Find a nice comparison-shopping site for Limo rental service: http://www.cheaplimorates.com/
It provide easy to use interface for users to compare and book limo service from airport pick up to trip between cities.

comparison-shopping on healthcare

There are a lot of inflated cost in health industry. However, there is comparatively little efforts in bringing in comparison-shopping to reduce cost. I did a collaborative study about this and it was published as a chapter in a book titled "Healthcare and the Effect of Technology: Developments, Challenges, and Advancements" edited by Dr. Kabene. In that study, we investigated the comparison-shopping practice in health industry ranging from health insurance, pharmaceutical, hospital service, physician service, etc. We found that the most developed sector in this field is comparison on health insurance. Services like insurable.com, healthinsurance.com, and ehealthinsurance.com, emerged quickly in the late 90s. Comparison-shopping for the selection of prescription drugs, hospitals, and physicians are next but lagging behind.We attribute this lagging behind to three factors: the lacking of commercial motivations from comparison-shopping service providers, relatively scant data available for comparison compared with the health insurance field, and concerns of copyright violation when the comparison-shopping service providers have to retrieve data collected by non-profit and private organizations like Joint Commissions.




Some state governments have begun to provide state specific hospital information for their resident patients. Massachusetts Health Quality Partners (MHQP), for example, is an independent state agency that monitors the quality of health services in Massachusetts. It provides side-by-side comparisons on clinic data via different search criteria based on different information needs. MHQP also looks at the quality of health service through patient experiences. Patients complete surveys and rate what it is like to work with their doctors. This information is then used to compare patient experiences across the state.


Some state government began to provide comparison-shopping on physician services. For example, New York State provides such a service and allows individuals to review a physician’s profile that includes their medical education, legal actions taken against the doctor, translation services available at the doctor’s office, etc.


Probably, the most widely available comparison-shopping services are prescription drugs prompted by increasing costs in recent years. These are mainly provided by state governments. For example, the Connecticut attorney general’s office provide a comparison-shopping service on prescription drugs and allows patients to compare pharmacy prescription drug prices across the state of Connecticut. The State of Illinois makes similar comparison-shopping information available to its residents.

According to a recent article by New York Times, some entrepreneurs will launch a service called Castlight that allow patients to compare cost of procedures. The data will come from insurance company since they paid for that. This is a clever idea cause insurance companies certainly have the incentive to reduce such cost. However, price may not be the most important factor in the decision by patients. The reputation of the doctor and hospital is more important. Also, if patients don't need to pay much for the service, there is little incentive for them to comparison shopping for that.


Currently, this new service is signing contract with companies because employers have the incentive to reduce cost too. So they may either persuade or push their employee to use it.


It is interesting to see what will happen next.

myTriggers.com and its lawsuit against Google

myTriggers.com is a comparison-shopping site that fully utilize the product category and search features. Its homepage is fully dedicated to different product categories and sub-categories. It encourages shoppers to type in the product keyword in the search box and it will return comparison information for the products pretty accurately. Recently, it launched a lawsuit against Google.

Product Data Feed Management for Shopbots

There are many product feed management services to help online vendors manage their product listing on various shopbots. Most data feed management service allow a vendor to manage their data feed to all major shopbots from Googe Product Search, Amazon.com, Kelkoo, MySimon, NexTag, PriceGrabber.com, Shopping.com, Shopzilla.com, Yahoo Shopping, MSN Shopping, etc.

Here is a list of such feed management services:
ChannelAdvisor.com
SingleFeed.com
productfeedmanager.com

Comparison-shopping for online travelling

Probably because of the SABRE system was one of the first online traveling system being developed, Web-based online traveling information comparison is a very sophisticated and developed comparison-shopping category. The current top 3 online travelling portals are Expedia.com, Orbitz.com, and Travelocity.com.

These three portals consolidated flight, hotel, and car rental information.A consumer could book and compare a complete travel package by using any of them. They also provide search engine for numerous online travel service companies like tripadvisor.com. In addition, services like priceline.com allows a consumer to offer a price for a flight, hotel or other travel services, and vendors to compete for the business.

There are also second generation comparison-shopping services in this category like Kayak.com, which retrieval information from the top 3 portals as well as other airline companies and then compare them for consumers to find the best air travel deals. hotelicopter.com did similar things for hotel reservations.

auto insurance comparison

To buy auto insurance is a complex process. There are many depends. There are no best insurance company for all drivers. It largely depends on the driver's driving history. It worth a lot of research to explore how to streamline the selection process and make individual find their best rate with much ease.

Every state government site lists agents and insurance companies by their insurance commissioner. So the state resident could file complaint. So one can look at the list and find the one has the fewest complaints. Epinion.com runs a section for consumers to review all type of insurances including auto insurance. Currently there are 92 insurance company entries. Those ratings could be misleading because many insurance companies have very few number of reviews.

There are several comparison-shopping agents specializing on insurance including auto insurance like insurance.com, insweb.com, netquote.com, and lowerratequotes.com. But some of them are merely collecting your information and then send to potential insurers.

Some innovative services by new insurance companies makes the comparison even more complex. For example, progressive.com will lower your rate if you agree to install a GPS device on your car so they can monitor your driving habit. milemeter.com will charge your premium based on the actual miles you covered in each month. So how to compare them and find the best one for one customer is really a challenge.

An article on the evolution of shopbot

This year is the 15th anniversary of BargainFinder demonstration project. BargainFinder was one of the first shopbots launched in 1995. It was developed as a research project by then Andersen Consulting. I wrote an article about this project and was published by IEEE computer in May 2010 issue. This article also presented several challenges for the future evolution of shopbots. 


Article: "What's Next for Shopbots?," Computer, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 20-26, Apr. 2010, doi:10.1109/MC.2010.93

A cool idea by Visuali.se: visualizing comparison data

Here is a newly launched (seems still in Beta test) comparison-shopping site (powered by Shopping.com) that could visualize the comparison information.

When you select a product category, all available products in this category will be displayed on the top of the page.




By clicking one of them, its information including price and technical details will be displayed in a new tab of the center page. You may select multiple products and each of them will be displayed in a new tab.



Once you want to compare them, you may click the "Click Here to View Important Product Features" and then a drop down menu appeared. You may select as many features to comparison as possible. Once you selected a feature, the information about them are displayed as bar graphs on the left or right side of the Page immediately.



When you decide the product to buy, you may click the "Buy it Here" tab and you will see all vendors that offering this product.

Though still kind of crude in design, this is a good multiple feature visual comparison shopping interface I've first see.