Dealio Toolbar Roars with Shopzilla

Vendio Services today announced that its Dealio comparison shopping toolbar, now covers all product categories, thanks to a new partnership with Shopzilla, one of the Web's largest comparison shopping site. Dealio claims to now covers virtually any product and category of products sold online. Vendio says Dealio now displays results from an index of over 30 million products and 100,000 online retailers.

The free Dealio toolbar debuted in beta release in August 2005, and began incorporating eBay auction listings in its search results in November. It was the first shopping comparison toolbar on the market — and several others have followed since.

New product categories now included in Dealio search results include apparel, home & garden products, computers, toys, jewelry, and much more. In addition, Dealio has reportedly added new features that "make it even easier and faster for consumers to compare prices and find the best deals online."

"By expanding our category coverage beyond consumer electronics, we've made Dealio even better," said Rodrigo Sales, co-founder and CEO of Vendio Services, Inc., the parent company of Dealio, in a written statement. "Dealio will now help you find the best prices on just about any product sold online, automatically, intuitively, and without requiring you to hunt them down across the Web.

He added that the company's objective with Dealio is to offer consumers the fastest, easiest way to find the best deals online, and partnering with Shopzilla, combined with the new features currently in development, propels them even further down the path to achieving that goal.

"We are excited to be partnering with Vendio, which, like Shopzilla, is focused on developing an outstanding shopping experience for consumers," said John Phelps, president of Shopzilla. "Vendio selected Shopzilla due to its industry-leading shopping search engine, and its depth and breadth of product retailer coverage."

One new time-saving feature of the Dealio Toolbar is called "Select and Compare," which allows users to quickly compare prices for products listed on any Web page. With this feature, users can highlight any word or phrase on a Web page, right click, and select "Compare Prices with Dealio" from the context menu that appears. Dealio will then automatically search for and present the best prices on relevant products from the Web's leading merchants and eBay.

Dealio searches can be conducted "manually" for all products, without requiring the user to leave the Web site they're currently visiting. Users can enter a word or phrase into the Dealio search window located in the browser navigation bar, or use the new "Select and Compare" feature described above, to generate an up-to-the-minute "snapshot" of the current pricing for any product.

In other news, Vendio says in the coming weeks Dealio's automated search capabilities, currently operational for consumer electronics products, will be expanded to search all product categories and across hundreds of additional e-commerce sites. In those instances, Dealio will intuitively determine when a user is about to overpay for a product on a leading e-commerce site and instantly presents the user with an "alert" in the browser navigation bar listing the lowest current price at which the product in question is available online. The user then has the option to open a sidebar in their browser to view the complete Dealio search results or simply click on the listing in the browser alert link to visit the merchant with the lowest price.

This new feature could force more e-tailers to pay more attention to the competition.

A Vendio spokesperson told ECommerce Guide today the company is not disclosing the exact number of Dealio downloads at this time, for competitive reasons. "But it's safe to say that the total number of Dealio downloads since official launch in November is approaching six figures," he said.

This spokesperson added that the Dealio tooldbar has an auto-update feature, which is turned on by default. Current users don't have to download the latest version themselves unless they turned this feature off.

The Dealio Toolbar is free to consumers and can be downloaded from www.dealio.com.

Devin Comiskey is the Managing Editor of ECommerce-Guide.