Online shopping toolbar gizmo

In My Humble Opinion
1

I saw this article about a new online shopping gizmo on a news site today:

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=305599&page=1

Here’s where you can download the shopping toolbar:

http://www.activshopper.com/

Apparently if you are shopping for something online, this toolbar will query multiple shopping sites and report the cheapest price for the product, and where to find it.

It looks like a nice little tool to have installed, and it’s free!!!

Has anyone tried it? Does it work very well?

2
      • I would be suspicious.
  • There seems to be very little info online about it, and the central question here is that if it’s not a GPL piece of software, then how are its creators getting paid? If it is the only shopping tool you use, then you would not know that you were getting the lowest price, it could send you to whatever sites it “preferred”, and then its creators would get “finders fees” from the companies that you bought stuff from, that you would not have otherwise. Get it?
  • If it was an open-source program available from somewhere like Sourceforge, I would believe it–but then I doubt that will happen anytime soon because in the past, online retailers have resisted any common webpage-data standardization that would enable customers to quickly and correctly search large numbers of online deals to find the best one. Online retailers want you on their site, clicking around, looking at everything they have for sale. They don’t want you to be able to instantly zero in on the one item you want, especially the one that they happened to run as a loss-leader this month.
    ~
3

Personally, I’d back away slowly and run at top speed after a few steps.