Click until you drop: Comparison shopping gets easier

People have been competing against machines ever since the first steam engine came along. Just ask John Henry (or Google him). We wondered whether a completely automated shopping site or a site that uses human assistance would find the best results.

Here’s what we found, pitting Mpire.com, which calls itself the Kelley Blue Book of online shopping, vs. ClayValet.com, a new site that says it is an online personal shopping service.

Each does things the other doesn’t. In general, ClayValet found slightly better prices. But Mpire was quicker and able to sort through a lot of purchase options that ClayValet doesn’t.

And both are Seattle companies still working out the kinks in what they offer.

Mpire CEO Matt Hulett said his company’s computers scour 30,000 Web shopping sites to find the best price.

ClayValet CEO Mikhail Seregine said his startup uses standard search engine technology but then gives each person’s product request to a personal searcher to find the best possible online deal.

Both companies offer their services free, at least for now.

We first asked for deals on a Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000, a good Web cam.

Mpire almost instantly produced a graph charting recent prices for that product, plus listing the current range from $80 to $93.

ClayValet, after we created an account, took the request and took 90 minutes. It recommended buying the Web cam for $67.99 at a Dell shopping site. It didn’t indicate whether a rebate was needed.

We clicked the link to the Dell site one day after the search was finished, but that item was $79.

The winner here: Mpire, by virtue of not sending incorrect information.

In a second search we asked for a new version of Adobe Premiere Elements, which is video editing software. Mpire spat out two low prices, $85 at one merchant, $99 at another.

After two hours of a search, ClayValet found the item for $62.99 after a $20 rebate from Amazon.

Winner: ClayValet.

In a third test, this time for a four-gigabyte Iogear flash drive, ClayValet again came out on top, finding a merchant that beat Mpire’s best price by $7.

So ClayValet came out on top, slightly.

Seregine, who used to work at Amazon, has leveraged the little-known worker-bee colony developed by Amazon called Mechanical Turk. That subunit of Amazon, at mturk.com, is a service that gives human searchers tasks to complete, for pay. Every request made at ClayValet gets parceled out to the Amazon Turk colony, with each task paying anything from one to 10 cents depending on the complexity of the request.

Through the experience and skills of those human searchers, ClayValet is able find the best deals, especially, said Seregine, if the item sought is not just a specific product. In some cases, the person needing something has some general criteria — such as the best cell phone for viewing movies — but wants ClayValet to find the best fit.

At some point, Seregine and his colleagues will need to either charge for searches or possibly develop advertising deals with affiliates.

ClayValet also lets you see results from other personal searches. Someone wanting the “best volumnizing shampoo under $25” got a basic answer (it involved going to Amazon). Another person wanted “the perfect notebook.” Without adding any other qualifiers, the requester was told to buy a Sony Vaio.

Many shoppers don’t want to labor through a dozen sites when looking for something, he added. “They just want to go to the Web and solve a problem,” he said, “or they know they don’t want to do lot of research at different sites.”

Mpire’s Hulett agreed that most people want simplicity in online shopping.

But Mpire’s advantage is speed and relevance, he added.

“Does it have to find the very best price? I think they want to know generally what the best prices will look like and we give that,” he said.

In addition to finding prices at standard ecommerce sites, Mpire offers visitors two other options — finding the requested item on eBay auctions or through Craigslist. No other Web site does that level of tracking, said Hulett.

Because Mpire also tracks historical prices, its results include price trends. Mpire generates its revenue, said Hulett, by allowing bloggers to add small widgets that use Mpire data. Those widgets provide ad links, and when visitors click the ads, a small fee is paid by the advertiser to Mpire.