Acses' "Comparison Shopping Cart" Makes Comparison Shopping Online Easier Than Ever Before

Business Wire, Nov 17, 1998

LUDWIGSBURG, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 17, 1998--Acses, a leading comparison book shopping service on the Internet, today added an innovative shopping cart technology to its popular website, enabling users for the first time to find the best offer for any collection of books they want to buy within a few seconds.

Visitors at http://www.acses.com simply choose any book and the Internet software robot then automatically visits 25 Internet bookstores simultaneously - such as Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com and several European sites - to retrieve the current prices for this book from each store. Acses users have already been able to compare prices for several books in one step, but they had to get the ISBN numbers of the desired books and enter them on the Acses site.

The new technology now makes comparison shopping - even for more than one item at a time - as easy as buying books in an Internet bookstore. Like in an Internet bookstore, Acses visitors put together their individual shopping cart by adding any books, which they can search for by title, author, keyword or ISBN. Once the comparison shopping cart is completed, the user selects his location (so Acses can calculate the shipping costs), his currency and a search time limit, and starts the price comparison with a mouse click. Acses will then present a list of all the offers for the requested selection of books, sorted by price. Clicking on one of the offers will lead the user to the website of the respective merchant. There the Acses Shopping Cart Transporter will guide him to fill the shopping cart at the bookstore's website with the items he selected at Acses within a few seconds.

"Most book buyers on the Internet order more than one book at any given time", said Christopher Muenchhoff, Managing Director of Muenchhoff & Janz GmbH, creators of Acses. "Consequently, finding the best price for a single book won't satisfy their requirements. Instead they need to know the merchant with the best total price for their entire selection, taking shipping costs into account. This is exactly what Acses tells them, allowing users to buy books automatically at Internetwide best prices and making comparison shopping online easier than ever before".

Acses, the "Next-Generation Shopbot" (The New York Times), is a service of Muenchhoff & Janz GmbH, an innovative German Internet-based company, which has set its main focus on Internet software robots and comparison shopping systems.