Published November 9th, 2006
in Money Saving Tools.
You must have already heard about Smack Deal events that JellyFish is carrying out to lure visitors to their shopping portal. TechCrunch was all over it last Monday. A very cool idea and a neat marketing trick. Bravo JellyFish! Let us look at a couple more web sites that use a similar concept.
WaitYourPrice lunched in July this year by Joshua James — an entrepreneur from North Carolina. It sells a limited quantity of the same items at a price that drops throughout the sale until the inventory is depleted. The items for sale are usually electronics and gadgets. Today’s sale was a Seagate Barracuda SATA 320GB hard drive and the last one sold for $83.68.
Shipping is at flat-rate, free, or calculated with the charges displayed before finalization of the order. WaitYourPrice also has forums where you can discuss current or check out past deals.
The web site looks pretty plain and the forums are not busy at all. It almost seems like Joshua is the only one running the operation.
zeeDive sells not one but multiple items with the prices going down as you shop. Most items have a reserved price which limits how low it can go — but some don’t. As I am writing this a 4-Shelf LCD/Audio Cabinet retailed at $349.95 has gone to $0 with no buyer in the view (s/h was $50).
You can buy the item right away or you can set a price and if it falls low enough and no-one buys it before you then the item is yours. Shipping charges are displayed at the item details page.
In general zeeDive looks like a very neat web site with a lot of AJAX and Javascript around the pages. A great idea as well however the prices on electronics (which I was mainly looking at) are not low enough to catch my eye. Need certainly to work on that.
Published November 5th, 2006
in Money Saving Tools.
It is only 18 days 9 hours 21 minutes and 15 seconds left according to the countdown timer BlackFridayAds have put on their banner.
The last Black Friday post has turned out to be the most searched for page of my blog. It is not surprising at all taking into account that Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, IL already has Christmas decorations up for a couple of weeks. Holidays in the United States have been commercialized to a great extent.
Anyway, there is some progress to report which is what I am going to do. The links below point to Black Friday related parts of the corresponding web sites.
- FatWallet has added a forum section dedicated to Black Friday rumors
- So did SlickDeals — the runner up in our most popular sites list
- BFAds are proudly taking the first position in Google search result by “Black Friday”.
- while GottaDeal comes in the second. I guess Goggle doesn’t know they are the “Official Black Friday site”. ;-)
- blackfriday.info is in sponsored and main Google search results. They are really serious trying to take the lead. Make sure to check them out
- DealTaker is busy filling in their Black Friday secion. They posted 16 rumors so far.
- I already mentioned BlackFridayAds — a new web site catering to hungry Black Friday shoppers. I suspect it is affiliated with AnandTech
- bf-06.com has come online with a few scans of Black Friday ads (thanks to errno for this tip)
- TheBlackFriday moves to the bottom of my list. So far it has not met my expectations content wise
This will the the list to check. There are also web sites like beatthecrowd.net and blackfridaygear.com that try to monetize on the rush. Yet I seriously doubt these will give you any original content.
Let me know if I missed any web site on my Black Friday shopping list. If it has original (not re-posted) rumors — I will be happy to add it.
Published October 21st, 2006
in Popular Sites Series.
This is the October 2006 revision of the Popular Bargain Hunting web sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.
Over the past month (partially thanks to your tips) I have discovered quite a few new web sites. 8 of them have made it to the top list. There are total of 16 sites that didn’t make it.
I have dropped the Page Rank > 0 requirement. Now all the web sites with Alexa < 100,000 are included. It is hard to understand how Google calculates the rank. Sometimes very popular sites get a rank of 0 (e.g resellerrating.com). I will still keep tracking Page Rank for the reference.
The change in rating shows the difference compared to the September results. The web sites that I don’t have last month results for are marked as n/a. The top looser appears to be gotapex.com with a -21.6% decrease in Alexa rank. The top gainer is dailyedeals.com with +18.3% increase.
Update: resellerrating is incorrect domain name. It should be resellerratings (with trailing ’s’) and the Page Rank is 7. Thanks to Dealigg for the tip.
Published October 18th, 2006
in Business Social and Money Saving Tools.
There are total of 349 Digg imitators out there according to this blog. Is this a lot? Apparently not. One more web site can now boast social shopping and voting for deals as the main force keeping their shopping deals supply fresh. Dealigg has recently made appearance in the cyber-news which went mostly unnoticed.
If you are familiar with dealspl.us and dealspy.org then you will probably notice the similarities among the three. I am not certain about dealspl.us but dealspy.org and dealigg.com both use Pligg – a popular open source content management platform – which partially explains the similar looks.
In general the web site looks OK although somewhat unfinished. The “Privacy Policy” and “Terms of Use” links are both broken and the styling could be somewhat refined. There are rough edges here and there.
An advice to Dealigg developers. Spend more time and effort marketing your web site. Should you choose Digg for your announcement do not repeat the mistake I made. Do it like the clever people have done it. Find an active user with a lot of friends/followers ready to digg his/her submissions and let them submit your story. This is the drawback of all digg style sites – including yours now ;-) – the news entry has to hit the front page before the second wave of diggers – those who never even look into upcoming news section – will pick it up and make a hit out of it. Digg is not ideal – it can be played.
As for the digg-style bargain hunting clones (or mods) – the market is ripe. Give it more time and you will see more sites like these popping up.
Update 11/19: If this site takes off you won’t be needing connections or bots anymore to play Digg. :-)
Published October 12th, 2006
in Money Saving Tools.
Lets go through the web sites that either made a lot of buzz in the past or seem to be showing signs of activity already as far as Black Friday is concerned.
- Blackfriday @ Gottadeal – a self proclaimed Official Black Friday site. They gained a lot of publicity in 2005 when somebody leaked Wal-Mart Black Friday ads and posted them on the forums.
- Bargainshare.com – already has 18 threads and 209 replies in their Black Friday 2006 discussion area dedicated to this year’s sale alone (the last year produced over 3000 comments).
- bf2005.com – was a very popular domain last year full of rumored Black Friday shopping deals. It redirects to bfads.net this time around – apparently the parent company. Have no doubt they will be ready posting those ads when the time is right.
- blackfriday.info (maintained by keepcash.com) – seems to be spending vigorously on promoting its domain. I would expect them to be busy this season as well.
- dealtaker.com – has a dedicated Black Friday area on their web site.
- theblackfriday.com – backed by DealsOfAmerica may offer some deals however the site doesn’t look ready yet. It still has the old 2005 ads.and last but not the least:
- fatwallet.com – probably trippled their user base after media releases like this flooded the news. They might keep it quiet this year despite the fact that Wal-Mart has backed away from that claim. Still I would check them just in case. Being the most popular forum they must have some useful stuff scattered here and there.
By the way bf2006.com and all domains till bf2015.com are already booked. Guys, I am ordering the #2016. Drop me a line if interested. I will not charge much. ;-)
Update 10/17: Since I posted this SlickDeals has added a Black Friday dedicated forum area.
