1) Search for information: the most obvious use is information search. these tools might be provided by a company running an E business website, by third parties as tools for use within a site or group of sites or for general use on the Internet.
2) Provide a service: These bots may provide a source of revenue in many different ways, such as by selling or hiring the bot to shop or by charging companies to have their products included in this search either on a monthly or hit basis.
3) Seek out a product: a bot may be used to seek out a product or types of product that match certain criteria, perform price comparisons or even act as a broker to purchase items on behalf of a customer. For example, in some auction sites, these tools can be used to automatically place bids for a user whenever he is out bid up to he's set ceiling price
4) Locate content: Bots or agents may also be used by ebusiness providers to locate content, compare prices or locate potential customers. They can also act as a semi-intelligent shopping assistant that can reduce the requirement for human ‘manned’ service centers.
5) Aggregate content: "Screen scrapers" or content aggregators collect content or account
information from sites for repackaging on other sites.