`Shopping bots'- Web sites that gather product information from various merchants have grown increasingly popular with online shoppers because they offer a way to compare product prices and availability across the Internet, saving the time and effort of sifting through hundreds of sites to find the best deal.

At the same time, shopping bots - that's short for`robots'are also becoming essential for electronic retailers, primarily because they are an effective and fairly inexpensive way to reach customers.

As a consequence, many online retailers are brushing aside the inherent threats of such services, which effectively bypass the brand-building of individual `e-tailers' by offering shoppers a short cut to the best prices all over the Web.

"Bots are and will always be perceived as a necessary evil," said Ken Cassar, senior analyst at research firm Jupiter Communications Inc..Most shopping bots serve as virtual yellow pages, collecting product and price information on millions of products from hundreds of e-commerce sites.

In many cases, merchants have the option of paying a fee to have their products highlighted and to advertise on shopping bots. Some bots sign exclusive agreements with affiliated retailers and might also take a percentage of transactions generated by the relationship.

Cassar said that the capital constraints now facing online retailers, with the equity markets slumping and venture capital drying up, are driving them to focus more on acquiring customers at the lowest cost, cutting down on high-priced marketing and advertising campaigns and funnelling funds to more essential services such as customer service and order fulfillment.

As a dot.com shakeout looms, retailers are doing whatever they can to slow their cash burn so that they might avoid the fate of the handful of companies that have watched helplessly as their coffers have run dry."Any low-cost business that can be brought in is coveted bymerchants," Cassar said, adding that struggling retailers currently pay between $30 and $100 to acquire one customer.

Recent history has shown that even comparison-shoppingsites are not immune to the dot.com shakeout. Brandwise.com, which served as a brand information site for consumers, shut its doors last week after only seven months of operation.

Even though relationships between shopping bots and retailers generally bring in single transactions as opposed to repeat customers, retailers are more than happy to pay the five to ten per cent per customer to get that transaction, Cassar said.Sites such as MySimon.com (http://www.mysimon.com) andDealTime.com (http://www.dealtime.com) let consumers search for a specific product from a number of merchants to find the lowest price. Once a consumer finds the deal he wants, he can click through to the retailer's site to complete the transaction.

Dan Ciporin is president and chief executive of DealTime.com, which recently merged with EvenBetter.com, a shopping bot controlled by Bertelsmann AG. He said he has seen a significant change in how shopping bots are viewed by merchants, manufacturers and consumers in the 11 months since DealTime.com began operating."E-tailers and merchants and manufacturers are starting to realise that the least-expensive source of customers for them are, in fact, sites like DealTime," Ciporin said.

"It's even more than just traffic, it's quality traffic,"he added. "These are potential customers as opposed to people who are just bouncing around the Internet. These are people who are looking to buy and ready to buy, and that's the kind of customer that every merchant wants and that we are able to deliver."DealTime, launched in June 1999, has grown from no merchants at start-up to having 8,000 listed on the service, which essentially operates as a Web-based yellow pages listing all Web retailing sites.

Ciporin said DealTime, which had about four million unique visitors in April, now has hundreds of retailers that pay a fee for lead referrals - a far cry from the start-up days when many retailers would attempt to block shopping bots' access to their Web sites.

"We've now come to the point where not only do merchants no longer try to block us, but we've doubled the number of merchants who pay us for referrals," he said. "That's a very long way from where we were several months ago when we were lucky if they even talked to us."

To be sure, many e-commerce companies still view comparison-shopping sites as a threat to their business.

"As they develop their content, educate consumers about products and about what stores do the best job, and start to match a consumer's needs with products, shopping bots start to usurp the traditional role of the retailer," Jupiter's Cassar said."If they are successful, that poses a distinct risk to the retailer- who may become perceived as little more than plumbing," he said. "Right now, the retailers are banking that they will do it better than the bots will."

One feature that could reinforce the perception that shopping bots are pushing retailers to the periphery is the so-called universal shopping cart, which lets shoppers place products from a variety of merchants into a single online `shopping cart' and purchase them in one transaction."It does further remove the merchant from the mind of the consumer," Cassar said, referring to the universal shopping cart. "If I can store everything I thought about buying in one place and am able to go back and quickly purchase all of it without having to remember which merchant I used, I would say, that was a distinct danger to merchants."