According to Eric Borgos, president of Netco Impulse Communications, the biggest problem with shopping for toys on the Web is the time shoppers waste trolling from one search engine to the next looking for a site that offers the lowest price for a particular toy.

‘Search engines are so poorly designed these days, you type in Barbie and you’ll get many different things-from sex sites to home pages by people who collect Barbies-but it’s not information you can use if you want to buy a Barbie Doll for the lowest price,’ says Borgos.

Thanks to Borgos’s super toy search engine toyhound.com, consumers need no longer partake in that frustration. Key in the name of a toy at the site’s search prompt, hit enter, and Toyhound scours 20 major toy sites simultaneously, including eToys, Amazon and TRU.com. Toyhound produces a page listing links to sites where consumers can buy a specific toy at the cheapest price point.

The site draws all of its revenues from affiliate deals, which pay a 5% to 10% royalty whenever one of its customer referrals results in a purchase. Since going up in January, Toyhound has drawn 5,000 visitors per month and pulled in US$3,000 in revenue, which works out to US$27,000 worth of sales at the various toy sites. Borgos projects revenues for Toyhound will climb to US$5,000 per month by the end of the year, as more consumers become aware of it. In aid of that cause, Borgos will link Toyhound with 20 new toy sites starting this month, and will also introduce a new column feature that will display each toy site’s monthly promotions.