PriceFight: Because There’s More to Shopping Than Low Prices
Marshall Kirkpatrick
26 comments »
Austin Texas based PriceFight launched this morning. It’s a shopping search engine that offers a metric it calls “Peoples’ Choice” in addition to displaying which merchants sell an item at the lowest price. Merchants are rated on the fly based on the number and rating of anonymous shopper purchases plus other details in a proprietary algorithm.
The company says that “not all prices are equal” and that merchants also need to be evaluated in regards to customer service, hidden offers and other less tangible factors. Price Fight CEO Michael Griffin says the goal is to “pick up on trends like limited time offers or special rebates that are otherwise hidden on many price comparison engines.”
After performing a search, shoppers are shown a comparison between retailers by the two major metrics (lowest price and Peoples’ Choice) and a report card for the store. Report cards show ratings overall, for delivery speed, customer service and a summary of return, security, shipping, and tax policies.
The site currently searches over only twelve large merchants and is focused on consumer electronics, but the company says it aims to expand its reach quickly. The Peoples’ Choice feature and merchant ratings have been compiled over the past seven months.
I like the idea here, though it doesn’t seem like it would be very hard to duplicate. Perhaps the biggest challenge would be to populate a system meaningfully before you open the doors to the public so it provides immediate value. Perhaps too the mystery algorithm for Peoples’ Choice will prove particularly valuable over time. Price Fight has been well designed and has a good URL. It’s nice to be able to compare things like shipping and customer service.
If online shopping magic is of interest to you, see also our reviews of bundling, math intensive Ugenie and our round up of aggregate review services.
Nice, just in time for the holidays. Fighting goes hand in hand with Christmas…according to South Park.
I just played around with it, I do like it a lot, very nice looking site also. They definitely need more merchants but like you said, that will come with time.
There should be a way to order the search results by price, lowest to highest. Isn’t the point of the site to find the best price?
Not difficult to duplicate? How is this different from seller ratings offered at pretty much every single comparison shopping site? No proprietary algorithms requred.
From the stats on my site, people don’t care about anything else except LOW PRICE…
Yawn… This space is getting very crowded and the innovation behind this space is lacking. The affiliate commission isn’t enough to support a company. I’m a super affiliate I owned dozens of affiliate sites. Good money, but not enough to support a CEO’s salary and team of developers. What’s their business model? Don’t tell me! its commission based.
Best of luck…
I like the simplicity of their UI. It’s nice and clean. I also like their concept of the “People’s Choice” but I would like to see more transparency on factors that make it the People’s Choice.
The screen shot of the merchant website doesn’t add any value, but replacing it with positive or negative indicators on the store would be useful. It looks like they are also using a CPA model, so without disclosing any revenue numbers, maybe showing a percentage of users who purchased from the various merchants would help define the “People’s Choice” better.
Overall, I like what PriceFight has done so far. There’s definitely room for improvement but congrats to the PriceFight team on their public launch.
The site looks nice and everything…but 12 merchants? Maybe a review (or a launch) should have been postponed until they were a little further along.
Ergonomic UI… but how different is it from PriceGrabber?
review doesn’t looks right to me. For example
http://pricefight.com/product/.....serReviews
average review rating 4 stars but non of the reviewer has a review more than 3
Hmmmm. I was actually hoping it would rate the companies based upon how “green” they are. Now *that* would be something to blog about.
I’d gladly pay a few dollars more here and there to support companies who are actually trying to be responsible eco-citizens.
(Ew, I just said eco-citizens. Sorry. But you know what I mean, I hope.)
-patrick
Duh.. everything is from amazon. Just another site with data feed from amazon. boring..
^ yes, i noticed that too.
i wish somebody would create this for fashion/shopping. i would gladly share my enormous database of top and second tiered stores that most girls shop online if it meant that somebody would create a killer solution specific to fashion. right now, we have to go from site to site and then hunt down codes to see who is offering what - this would be so much easier.
In the customer’s mind, price is often associated with quality; in reality, service is just as important. If the merchant is to make any money as a price leader, product quality or service has to suffer (unless you have buying clout, in which case the suppliers suffer). It is nice to see that these guys are adding the service dimension into the online shopping experience. Now customers have a way to determine if the low is too high in the long run.
The problem with their secret shoppers/customer rating is service varies from store to store. If that’s one of their major metrics any algorithms they use that factor that in are flawed.
I think this is quite deceiving. A toshiba laptop i was looking for was listed at $898 on pricefight as the lowest price. However, I found two other sites compusa and fry’s which had the same laptop that I was looking for, priced at $549 and $649
Please try to stick to correct grammatical structures.
Specifically, “in regards to” is incorrect usage.
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/regards.html
Thanks.
This is a pretty sweet idea, I like it.