Order Management

Say you’re in the market for a digital camera and want to do some pre purchase investigating online. Today you may go to a site such as Shopping.com, which features lots of sponsored listings and data fed directly from merchants Become.com offers a different approach. This beta search site crawls the Web for product-related information, including data from the product maker, magazines articles, links to online forums for product owners, and other useful nuggets. A team of editors then cleans up and organizes the results.

Sounds a bit like Google’s Froogle shopping service, right? But while Froogle also crawls the Web, it emphasizes product specifications, prices, and sellers- not the broader context of reviews and forums that the new shopping site delivers. Search Become.com for “Canon Powershot”, for example, and you will receive plenty of helpful evaluations from a range of sources, along with links to online forums about the camera.

The Beta brilliant Shopper also aggregates product info, but it has much more cluttered look than Become.com.

How can you protect your rights when buying software? Start by being informed. AFFECT has launched a campaign called stop Before You Click. The program promotes what it calls the 12 Principles for Fair Commerce in Software and other Digital Products. AFFECT’s goal is not only to raise consumer awareness of unfair user terms, but also to help develop better laws.

So to avoid the fitfalls that EULAs present, before you buy a given product, try to shop around for the most consumer friendly agreement: Check the companies’ web sites and read the associated EULAs, if available (Adobe and Symantec, for example, post EULAs prominently on their sites). Also, once you have the product in hand, you must read those license agreements closely. For instance, look for an “automatic renewal” clause. You sign up to try out a piece of soft.