Deals.com has quietly launched over Thanksgiving as a new socially oriented Digg-style site for bargain hunters.
If you take a ride back in time you will be able to see that in previous life the domain hosted a traditional bargains site (first as Overstock and then independently) before in March 2005 it became a price comparison engine. This will be the third reincarnation and this time around it will join the likes of dealspl.us, dealplumber, judysbook, dealigg, trezr, and most recently — modoshi.
Demand Media who owns the project has set up a tutorial on how to use the new web site (by the way eHow which hosts the tutorial is another property owned by Demand Media).
I signed up for an account and had a short test drive. So far the impression is positive. Here are a few comments.
- The Quick Submit Tool is a great idea. Drag the button to your browser toolbar and submitting deals just became much easier
- No profit sharing of any kind… Huh? I guess with domain name like this you do not need it.
- Items images/thumbnails are in details but not in the list view… Any particular reason for this? The visual element is a very important part of shopping. I wouldn’t hide it behind an extra mouse click.
- Got to separate coupons and discounts from the rest of the merchandise. Mixing these different things is not very natural.
- Need a page with the list of featured stores so users could browse deals by store as well as by category.
In general I suggest taking a look at dealspl.us who seem to be setting the standard in social bargain hunting. They have been fortunate to get in the market early and are now experimenting with such add-ons as user friends and discussion groups. And by the way, dealplumber — the dealspl.us closest rival — has recently done a redesign to look more dealspl.us-ish — that tells something, doesn’t it? :-)
D’oh. These social bookmarking style deals sites are really dime-a-dozen these days (and I’ve just done one last week). Maybe one day there will be more sites than the actual deals around :)
As of Deals.com and profit-sharing, there seems to be Amazon items with affiliation on it. I guess aff links are okay with them.
Also the thumb nail images are from shopping.com price comparison affiliation links, but no image on the actual “story” itself. I’ve been toying with this thumbnail generation thing with my own site, and having found the best way to create an image WITHOUT asking the users to include the image URL. Figuring out the product image from any random product page is certainly possible, but not always the case.
However you must say, deals.com has one of the best domain name, and they’ll surely get a lot of type-in traffic this way.
They don’t mention anything in ToS about use of aff links. It is either a neglect or a planned strategy for an expedited launch of the site.
Re: image extraction. Take a look at Roosster, they are doing a great job extracting those from different sources.
According to Leapfish the Deal.com domain is worth $266,418. It might not be too far from the actual market price. I personally just love it!