Published July 20th, 2007
in Business Social.
I am back from my trip to Ukraine digging through the news I missed while on the move. This interesting bit has just attracted my attention: Trezr, the deals site I reviewed in the past, has sold on eBay for an impressive $30,100.01.
The auction (link) started on July 5 with initial price of $1.00 and gradually attracted bids over the 6 days period (I am sure this coverage at Techcrunch helped to float the price).
Trezr launched in October, 2006 and failed to ride the social revolution other deal sites enjoyed. It sports impressive design and some interesting features (profit sharing and a widget) however fails to implement certain key features a successful deal site must have. I have been following Trezr in my monthly list which it dropped out of in February when its Alexa rank fell above 100K threshold.
According to the auction description the website traffic at the time of sale was mere 4,000 visits and 7,500 pageviews per month and the service had 900 registered users. Other interesting details: Trezr was written using Ruby on Rails and is hosted on a dedicated server ($950 a year expense).
Published February 1st, 2007
in Popular Sites Series.
This is the January 2007 revision of the Popular Bargain Hunting web sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.
The change in rating shows the difference compared to December results. The list has a total of 47 web sites. There are 20 more in my database that didn’t meet the Alexa Rank < 100,000 requirement.
You will notice that Page Rank values are dancing a lot compared to the previous month. This is due to two factors: (1) Google rolled out a PR update in January and many websites were affected; (2) thanks to your comments, I reworked the script calculating Page Rank to take into account results from multiple data centers and to include "www" prefix into the domain name. The script changes however accounted only for some of the positive Page Rank change. If you see a decrease -- it is because of the Google update.
The biggest gainer is Deals with Alexa rank grows of 13.6%. This is a residual grows mostly due to the spike in popularity in early December when the website was launched. The weekly average for web site is actually above 100,000.
The biggest looser is Trezr with 50.73% change in Alexa rank. The web site is experiencing a steady decline ever since it launched in September.
I periodically submit there my best blog posts with money saving tips but I really don't see many visitors coming back. Do you want to know why? You might find an answer here.
Published October 4th, 2006
in Business Social and Money Saving Tools.
I would like to welcome a new addition to our collection of popular bargain hunting sites which is due for an update later this month. This new web site has been just a few months in the wild and yet it seems to be attracting plenty of attention. Lets us see if this is a long lived fame. ;-)
The concept is similar to Digg in the sense that people can submit links and then get them Trezr’d (voted for). When you submit a link you pick a category (no tags folks?). They also distinguish deals, coupons, and money saving tips as 3 major categories. A single vote equals to a silver coin. Several silver coins is a golden one. Only links with a golden coin are kept in the system (for up to 3 months according to their FAQ). The smaller unpopular items are removed after a while (a sort of garbage collection). Naturally the top picks (7 of them from each: deals, coupons and tips) get to the front page.
The web site is very nicely designed in Web2.0 style with rounded corners and a lot of gradient colors. I opened an account for a test drive and had a very nice impression overall.
When you submit a deal you are currently not allowed to attach an image. There are also no special fields for the item price or discount. You are basically limited to several sentences to describe your item. In that respect Trezr is behind dealspl.us or other web sites specialized in on-line shopping.
A very smart move on their part is the incentive program Trezr offers to the people submitting links. It is a revenue sharing via Google advertising. I personally think there is a major conceptual difference between sharing ad revenue and allowing people to use affiliate id in the links they submit (read more here about monetary side of it). With the first approach you as a submitter are more rewarded for the attention the link generates. With the second approach your incentive is closely connected to the shopping transaction. Due to this fact the second approach is more easily abused (read dealplumber review here for an example). Why? You click on the link, your id is stored in the URL, then you forget about the original web site and continue browsing the merchant’s shop. Nevertheless your id is preserved in the URL and when you make the purchase the referrer gets their commission. This naturally stimulates referrers to submit more links with their ids creating a network of low quality offers.
One more twist to the Trezr story is the weblet they promote (see it on the right side). The weblet is essentially a web widget that you can install on your web site to display the links you submitted to Trezr (or just any links from their web site). It looks like widgets now are “must have” for a successful web site.
Also read this Trezr review from our Australian friends. As for the fame… I think even if Trezr doesn’t become a shopping destination due to the limited visual presentation of items for sale it has a good shot at staying afloat as a social portal where people can exchange money saving related tips. The time will show.
