ProBargainHunter.com

This week I am reviewing dealoco.com on request. Dealoco is a new site, which to my guess was launched (may be unofficially) in October of 2007 and made an official launch in December 2007 (per the press release). Most references online and the press release mention advanced search engine, custom deal alerts, product reviews and grief factor. In this review we will see about these and several other features.

I recall reading in some blog/forum which tells something like “most deal sites have a look and feel of a design by a high school student who made a website for fun”. Yes, that is how most deal / coupon websites are, though there are some exceptions. Given that there is so much information deal sites want to get out within a short time, most sites tend to overload pages by cluttering excessively. But visiting this deal site made me think that it was one of those exceptions, a very nice & pleasant layout and feel. It is this look and feel of the website, which made it worth a review.

Quickly about the layout, the main top menu links to several categories of products such as cameras, computers and so on. Above which is a search box and above it are links to forums and other regular stuff. The home page lists “featured deals” for the day and the past few days with each day made into a block. Details about each block can be minimized or expanded, with the ability to expand or minimize all the items in a block in a single click. Each of the category pages list deals for that category in a chronological order.

For each deal Dealoco displays an image and pricing information that show the original price and the available discounts. The “Grief Factor” is also listed here. Per their FAQ:

What the heck is Grief Factor?

Grief Factor is a quick and easy way to determine the difficulty of pulling off a deal. The scale ranges from 1 to 5 (1 is the easiest, 5 the most complicated). If you’re not in the mood to fill out lengthy mail-in-rebate forms or to drive into town for a price match, stick to the “1”s and “2”s and you’ll be stress free.

This Grief Factor is a cool and useful feature for the lazy. Grief Factor is displayed in a nice curvy box, which links to the FAQ. This could have been a tooltip or even a mini pop-up.

Each deal also includes Price Comparison and Reviews in expandable boxes. Price Comparison lists the prices in about 1-3 other stores while the reviews box carries link to reviews in one of the stores.

Now let’s see the search feature. Search tries to find results from dealoco.com as well as their partner PriceGrabber.com. First trying the default search box on the top of the page, here is my results:

i) Nikon – No local results (we will not consider results from pricegrabber from this review). However going to the “Cameras” tab shows Nikon S510 right on the first page, but expired. Good that they decided not to show the expired deals by default.
ii) Panasonic 790SW – (790SW is an Olympus camera, which is an active deal, so are Panasonic products, this search term is to see how the search reacts for such confused queries). I expected to see results for both Panasonic and 790SW, but what I got was “None Found”.
iii) 226095 – The manufacturer part number of the Olympus camera said above – “None Found”

Now the “Power Search” – From the first look the options are just impressive. Without going into great details, this search enables filtering the deals based on several things like category, manufacturer, model number, price, store etc. However none of these filtering options can be coupled with a keyword to search.

Next we head to the “Forums”. Forums randomly duplicate the deals posted in the website (i.e., a majority of products posted in the deals pages are again posted here). It’ very understandable that being a new website, there are no responses for the forum posts. However this duplication should have been avoided, as it does not practically add any value for the user. Whether planned or unplanned, the DeaLoco logo features the blue color used in most post forum posts and thus well integrates. However the postings as such are just as an exact copy of the actual deal. Otherwise, the look and feel of the forums is just the typical “VBulletin” look.

Now let’s look at the heart of the website – the deals. I examined the 7 deals featured for today on the home page. Of which 1 item cannot be checked as it was refurbished and 1 was marked expired. Of the 5 left, 4 were perfect (cheapest possible from a reputable store) while one deal was wrong. A webcam listed for 9.99 at Amazon, while it was actually 43.93, however this item was also listed for 9.99 from NewEgg in the price comparison box and it is right. So I assume that Amazon has increased the prize.

A quick browsing of old deals shows that deals are regularly checked and marked expired, which is really good. However archiving deals which are several months old does no good for users.

There is one big observation though. The number of deals posted seems to be less. Using the power search, I see that only 90 deals were posted in the past week. I agree that quality is more important than quantity. With deals categorized, there are very few deals posted into each category daily. Given that there are only about 15 deals per day on an average, a single page to see all of those would be better (however power search can get this for you). With so many categories (this is pretty much the complete list of categories in most deal websites), it is not clear why the number of deals is so small. This small number of deals surely won’t motivate anyone to make trips to the website.

Overall, design and features look really good. Promptly marking deals as expired is good. Some pruning of old deals, avoiding duplication in forums and a few more deals per day will surely get this deal site moving much faster. For a numeric score, I would rate it at about 8/10.