The Impacts Of Shopbots On Online Consumer Search

Online price comparison agents (shopbots) allow consumers to instantaneously receive price and other information from many online retailers. Online consumer clickstream data from ComScore Inc. demonstrate that consumers are increasingly using shopbots to conduct search. This phenomenon raises such questions as "How do shopbots change consumers' search behavior?" and "Do they reduce consumers' online search?" Conventional wisdom suggests that consumers are expected to search less because shopbots have displayed prices and other relative information from retailers on the search result page(s).