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7. There's Always Haggling

I had fun at Hagglezone.com. In fact, this was the most entertaining site I visited on my tour. Here you pick one of eight automated salespeople — each with a name, picture and personality profile — with whom to haggle over price in a chatlike exchange. For instance, you can try your luck with Trish, a bubbly gal who will "cut to the chase," or take on T.J., a rad-looking dude who is "extreme in everything he does; surfing, socializing and giving great deals." Unfortunately, Hagglezone had only four digital cameras, none of which met my standards. Nonetheless, I tried haggling over two cameras, once with T.J. and once with Trish, and after seven or eight volleys of offer and counteroffer, managed to get them down from $399 to around $350Ñ$49 cheaper than Amazon's price for the same camera. Too bad Hagglezone didn't have a better selection.

8. Your Desktop Buddy

Finally, I tried a "shopping buddy" — which works much like a bot, except that you download it. Your buddy resides on your desktop, watches you shop and, at certain sites, lets you know if there's a better deal elsewhere on the Net. I sampled one called ClicktheButton. While I was on the page of a particular product, a window popped up and asked me if I wanted to compare prices at other sites. When I said yes, it returned a fairly thorough list that included shipping, tax and the familiar BizRate info.

It disappointed me that Clickthebutton didn't work with every site; on the other hand, its large number of partners — 83 in electronics alone — makes it worth trying. But sometimes it would show prices at 18 other stores, other times only a couple, even though I knew there were other participating stores that carried what I wanted. Sometimes it failed to pop up at all. In any case, if you bookmark your favorite shopping bot — I like DealTime — and flip to it before you make a purchase, you'll get a comparable service.

And that, I have learned, is the very least you should do when shopping online: run your item through a shopping bot before you buy. If you enjoy the blood sport of auctions and you have some extra time, by all means, do some price research and go to it. But if you want to move quickly, you can still hop back and forth between the bots and a favorite site like Amazon to find the best information, the best deals and a merchant you can trust. And you can do this without wearing out your tires or even taking up very much time. With so many ways to shop, why settle for just one?

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY FRANCISCO CACERES