PriceProtectr is a neat new tool that helps you take advantage of guarantees by many online retailers to refund the difference on purchased items if the price drops in the 30 or 60 days following your purchase (example - Best Buy’s policy). Those guarantees are great, but few people go to the trouble of following up and checking on any price changes for items they’ve purchased.
The company has put together a very simple website, even using a vowel dropping name and the generic web 2.0 logo generator that we’ve previously written about. To use it, you simply paste in the product URL from an ecommerce site (example) and your email address. The company will notify you if the price drops within the time period allowed by the retailer.
As of today, the site claims to have found over $57,000 in savings, with few people aware of the service. This might be something someone just put up for fun, but it is a useful tool. Frankly, retailers should email you themselves if the price drops, and if a service like this gets popular enough, they may start doing that. Supported sites include Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Backcountry.com, BestBuy.com, BestBuy.ca, Bike Nashbar, Circuit City, Cooking.com, Costco, Future Shop, Jenson USA, Office Max, Sears, 6th Avenue Electronics, Staples.com, Staples.ca, and Target. See Thrillist for their review as well.
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Nice. They have the Web 2.0 logo generator logo and an “r” name so a $5 million round of funding must be right around the corner.
undoubtedly.
Sorry but I wish they had been a little more original with their logo and not add a 2.0. It just undermines their true potential
ya seems like 1999…whats with all these VCs….maybe I should get funding also to walk my cat….it does not seem like a big deal to VCs to put in couple of mills…but this service seems like it will save me enough money in 3 months to fly to Vegas…very cool
My first time to comment on TechCrunch. I found this site is amazing. I get to see many new business ideas and services. And I get to know many emgerging companies. Priceprotect is the kind of service I never think of. This site is just amazingly interesting
Darn the Logo Generator is down.
There go my dreams of being a Web 2.0 bubble jockey…
I agree with Raj and I think they don’t have to so obsessed with 2.0.
We only track Amazon right now, but for the people who don’t want to give out there email check out http://www.rsstalker.com. We have feeds for price drops of 10% or more, various amazon catagories and you can generate a feed for you entire wishlist.
First Comment as well ( although I have been reading daily for months ): The service is totally a “why-haven’t-I-thought-of-it -before?”.
With online shopping constantly increasing I think this guy(s) are doing something great.
I hope they get enough traction fast, add more features and anticipate competition as copying the service is not very hard.
Great service!
Consumers love to save money, so I think this new site will do well.
I absolutely agree with you Michael that retailer should email us if a price drops after we have purchased a product. Imagine how much money retailers would loss. I think a service like this might make them think twice about customer satisfaction.
However, if enough people don’t use the service, the Big Dogs have won.
Message to the BIG DOGS:
PUT CONSUMERS SATIFACTION FIRST AND PROFITS WILL INCREASE.
Last June I’ve seen people on slickdeals talking about refundplease.com, frozenwarrior.com/~pricewatch/ and amazingrefund.com. They all are doing basically the same thing as PriceProtectr, but for amazon only.
A firefox plugin would be nice for this, to automatically add the the url and info when you are on the products page, kind of like bugmenot.
I have been working on a concept like that, but on a grander scale. I have been experimenting with a new type of spider Technology that analyzes an entire website and shows the users where all the great deals are.
It’s cool to scrape a few websites, but become unrealistic when you are trying to do it on every ecommerce sites.
PriceProtectr is a great additional feature. I might open source the pattern recognition technology and crawler later once it becomes more stable and less CPU intensive.
http://www.focusdeals.com
The site is 100% autonomous. Like I said before, it’s only a science experiment into the AI world. Not ready for primetime yet.
I don’t think retailers would ever deploy something to make them lose money like that. The whole reasoning behind the 30 day price matching policies as well s “110% Price Match” at time of purchase is to place the responsibilities of you as a consumer to find the lowest prices. They know their prices aren’t always the lowest on all items - therefore they have loss-leaders etc to get customers to the store in hopes of customers buying other higher-margin products.
Simple idea and real value. I would think that the comparison shopping sites are what these guys have to worry about most from a competitive standpoint. You can already create wishlists and get notified when prices drop through sites like pricegrabber.com .
I was expecting this service to be offered by Froogle or similar price aggregator service.
If priceprotectr can extend this service to smaller ecommerce sites, it will give them an opportunity to be promoted by thousands of smaller sites.
This could be a win win for everyone. To help spread the use of the product they could develop a contribution for (osCommerce.
This web site does the same thing, has been up longer, and works fine.
http://www.refundplease.com/
They need to add Buy.Com and Frys.Com….This is an interesting way for me to track if they are dropping below MAP pricing.