• Wired, Tuesday, December 12, 2006 11:15 AM

It's a busy buying season, but made easier by the Web, which can double as a shopping mall. Several sites help navigate this crowded marketplace.

Sites like Offertrax, StyleFeeder and Mpire don't actually sell anything; instead, they improve customer purchasing intelligence by crawling the Web for bargains and notifying subscribers, via RSS feeds.
On Offertrax, users create "tracks," a simple collection of bookmarks that are checked for updates every hour. As new offers come up, they're sent out to subscribers. Mpire, a plug-in for Firefox users, shows competitor prices no matter what shopping site a user is currently browsing; it also calculates price fluctuations over a short period of time. Farecast offers another similar predictive pricing service for the airline industry.

StyleFeeder is very different. It's more like a social network for shoppers, where users can create and share wish lists. The site's members can also see one another's RSS feeds and subscribe to them.

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