Bountii Launches, Aims At Better Price Comparison Shopping

bountii_logo.pngThe internet is supposed to be a place of intense price competition, but you can’t always find the best deals on any one site. To solve the problem, online price comparison search engines were born. We’ve covered a few newer ones before, such as TheFind and Mpire, although these sites also include a variety of other features.

Bountii is a new price search engine started by two founders from the latest Y Combinator class. They focus on the incredibly popular and competitive category of electronics, currently crawling over 30 merchants. Bountii says they differentiate themselves from other price search engines by digging deeper into the prices. Their data includes shipping and handling, and finds especially low prices normally hidden from basic searches, like the ones Costco only shows at check out. The system can add shipping and handling by zip code.

bountii_small.pngBut the real test is how well it finds low prices. While it’s by no means comprehensive, I ran a simple test across some pricing search engines for the term “lg 42″ plasma hdtv”. While the search experience varied greatly, the numerical results I came up with were as follows: TheFind ($962.65), MySimon ($1099.99), Mpire ($968.09 inc. S&H), Bountii ($1057.86), Google (listed $968.09 but really $1,061.95). Price Grabber was the most frustrating. The initial results listed $799 as the bottom price. However, you find out that it’s for a refurbished unit. The actual price was $983.53, which you find is $1043.43 with shipping and handling.

While not the lowest in this case, Bountii was competitive. I can imagine the results would be different on another product. The sites that did the best found this deal at Ritz Camera, which has free shipping and handling.