Külist offers price comparison bookmarklet and cash back
Marshall Kirkpatrick
19 comments »
Külist is a new service that uses a browser bookmarklet to offer price comparisons across a number of online shopping sites. The service offers cash back for using its affiliate links on select sites, a referral reward program for getting other users into the service and price tracking alerts by email.
Külist is headed by Don Wolfe of San Clemente, California. I think it’s a great way to offer value to incentivize use of a particular company’s affiliate links. I haven’t found any other service that combines all the features that Külist does. It may not be pretty, but I like the way it works.
The service supports price comparisons from item pages in a number of different sites: Google, Froogle, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Become, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, Shopzilla, PriceRunner, Amazon, Buy.com, Bestprices, J&R, and Walmart.
On search results or item pages in any of the above services, you can click on the Külist Prices bookmarklet and see a drop down window at the top of the page showing the price of your item on other sites. Clicking the vendor link in that box enables you to add the item to a watchlist. The watchlists offers price tracking and alerts by email.
The affiliate links provided through Külist give you a cut of the revenue generated through their use, at least through the services that allow this to be done. Unfortunately, Külist says it currently cannot offer cash back from Amazon.com, BestPrices or Walmart. That’s a shame. You get 2% cash back from the vendors that are included in this feature.
Similarly, the system offers two easy ways to earn %1 cash back for purchases made by people you’ve referred to the system. They don’t have to identify you as the person who referred them, which is good. If you email people about the system (no spamming allowed Külist says!) and add Külist in the Bcc field, the email address of the recipient is added to your list of referred friends. You can also put your own Külist affiliate link on your blog and people who click through will generate revenue for you as well. (I have not done that here.) The ways this is implemented are not necessarily transparent, but that’s always an issue with affiliate links.
Külist is more than usable enough now and hopefully implementation will only improve with time. I think it’s a very interesting model.
it appears that Külist will have to ‘modify’ links on-the-fly to track and encode IDs to generate affiliate sales with the list of merchants they’ve advertised. this sounds like hijacking?
some merchants disallow incentive programs when dealing with publishers and affiliates incl. walmart as you have already noted.
won’t all price comparison sites object to Külist ’stealing’ their potential customers?
Cool service.
“If you email people about the system (no spamming allowed Külist says!) and add Külist in the Bcc field, the email address of the recipient is added to your list of referred friends”
I haven’t seen that done anywhere else, that’s really clever.
You could have snuck a plug for us in to the article though
http://www.priceheat.com
How would they ‘modify’ links on the fly? Don’t each of these affiliated merchants have their own syntax for the URLs?
technically, the javascript scan the web page and extract the product ID etc. and then a new affiliate URL is built. for pages that already have affiliate IDs embedded, that’s where i think it would be called hijacking…
I don’t know - the hijacking element and the vaguely pyrimidal feeling promotion model make me wary. THat being said, I haven’t tried it yet, so who knows…
Interesting idea, though if you want a simple personal price comparison site that is basically like delicious for price comparison you should checkout dealtagger.
http://www.dealtagger.com/
This service seems fairly rudimentary. First off, the very basic stuff. If I am searching on amazon, when I click on the bookmarklet, I expect to see stuff from other sites and not from amazon (I have the amazon list in front of me already!!!). Second, there does not seem to be any product mapping. So there is no apples-to-apples comparison. Things work at the category level.
This kind of price comparison has been done by travel meta-search sites for a while. And they have been able to show prices for the SAME HOTEL as the one you are looking at at a particular site. That’s a lot more useful. Checkout the desktop tools from sitestep and searchparty.
George - I don’t follow….
I looked at an example using the book: “The Da Vinci Code”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385504209
That book was the first one in the resulting search and I saw prices from 5 other merchants (not including Amazon)! I found it useful to see Amazon’s prices in the list with the other merchants because it makes it easy to compare the prices without having to scroll the page.
Product mapping? The prices that I saw appeared to be all mapped to the ISBN for the book (it shows next to each book listed). That seems to be very “apples-to-apples” to me.
It may be worth noting - they now claim that searches can be done on “any” site (not just the ones mentioned above).
I tried it out on a digital camera review site and it showed products and prices for the camera I was looking at.
As founder of Kulist.com, I would like to address the ‘hijacking’ comments.
Our tool does NOT modify any links on the page for which our code is run (on-the-fly or otherwise).
We only use our affiliate ids in our own links that are shown in the price comparison results. All other links on the page are left untouched and will provide credit to their respective sources.
I would be happy to address any other questions.
Don Wolfe
Kulist.com
I use this site and am currently a member. I like it, it is easy money. Granted it hasn’t made me a millionaire yet, but heck, who would complain about free money?
surftrekker (#11):
The domain kulist.com was registered on June 4th this year (12 days ago)
Let’s say that they actually launched that same day. Let’s assume they’ve actually got any press whatsoever before the post in TechCrunch (?).
Am I to believe that less than two weeks after launch there’s people already claiming to be a “satisfied user making money”?
Someone clarifies this to me, because it doesn’t add up, and I’d hate to realize that I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing.
RBA (#12):
You are absolutely correct, I am not a “Satisifed user making money” as of yet. “Yet” being the keyword. I have been a beta tester(before June 4th) and I’ve emailed(continue to email) this thing out to all of my friends, friend’s friends, and family members. I’ve been very active with this application because I am firm believer in that this can make me some good residual money in the near future.
I’ve asked my network of users already what they thought of their shopping experience thus far and they have supplied some great feedback.
Feedback that has been making its way back to the founder. Some of my users have purchased products, so technically I have made money but realistically it takes a while to get to you. Room for improvement here for sure.
I apologize if my email misled you or any other reader.
Sincerely,
surftrekker