Comments(1) SecretPrices.com was recently mentioned in the article “How Web 2.0 is built” posted April 6th on Yahoo! France. I can get the general gist of what it is saying from the translated version, but not 100%. If anyone knows French, I’d like to know really like to know what it says exactly.
(Links: Article Link | Translated Link)
Comments(0) Last Monday the winners of the AWS / Microsoft contest were announced.
The following criteria was used during the juding of the winners:
The winners and the respective pages:
I checked out the sites and there are some interesting ideas that utilize the AWS. I personally would have picked the third place winner over the first place winner… Not that I have anything against Santa. Anyway, good to see Amazon continuing to fuel innovation, and great to see people using MS VS 2005!
Comments(4) 
My previous post of The Next Generation of Deal Sites shared my vision for a model for future deal sites as a shopping comparison hybrid. This follow-up is another interesting concept. A deal aggregator. The one that first comes to my mind is ClipFire, which launched the beginning of this year. It essentially works by aggregating RSS feeds from a variety of different deal sites, and pushing the information into a searchable database. The social part comes into play as users are allowed to vote (or “clip”) their favorite deals and tag them.
Kevin Carey is the creator of this ClipFire service, but some are curious of how he can swing a profit from it. On a TechCrunch post from earlier this year Michael Arrington reviewed the service, and several readers posted some interesting comments regarding the issue of the site generating revenues. One that caught my attention was an idea to manipulate the RSS changing the affiliate IDs 50% of the time. Aside from being an issue of morals, and the pains involved in doing that, it that basically throws the whole point of the community site out the window. Pete Cashmore, of the Mashable.com blog, believes a better approach would have been to split revenue with users and let them post the deals. His review of the ClipFire service, which calls it Digg for Deals, is a skeptical one. Pete I agree with you on the point of perhaps filling up with spam in the future, but only if the site becomes very popular! And what isn’t filling with spam these days?
At this point the site itself seems to be doing fairly well, but I haven’t really heard much buzz about it recently. It has seemed to follow the inevitable trend of “mashups” to have a large traffic spike and then seem to bottom-out after the initial buzz has passed. Check out the Alexa graph below:
As far as the service itself goes, a suggestion I would have Kevin consider is perhaps trying to utilize regular expressions to draw out the expiration date. I’ve used ClipFire myself several times, but on more than one occasion expired information shows up at the top. Stowe Boyd picked up on another problem that didn’t really cross my mind… The issue of different currencies. Stowe states:
“I already noticed one problem: costs of various products are not normalized to the end users currency. I saw deals for London hotel stays provided in pounds, for example. And the cost of goods are embedded in the text associated with the deal, not pulled out as a primary attribute. There is as a result no way to sort by price, which seems an obvious thing to do.”
While making the results sortable by price is definitely not as easy as it sounds, it might be a good idea to determine prior to aggregation what country the feed is coming from. The problem lies within the fact that the deal information is not in a structured format, thus you can’t easily determine the price, just as you can’t easily determine the expiration date. Perhaps it is time for a “deals” microformat!
Technorati Tags: deals, clipfire, social search, social shopping, community commerce, digg, microformats
Comments(1) For as long as I can remember, deal/bargain sites like DealCatcher, and comparison shopping sites, like PriceGrabber, remained separate entities. Being a true online bargain hunter meant monitoring deal sites like a cop visits Dunkin Donuts. Shopping comparison engines were only used when neccessary. Over time, as comparison engines matured, it became apparent how closely a match deal sites and shopping comparison sites were for each other. Every major deal site began to partner with a shopping comparison engine, namely PriceGrabber. See for yourself all the PriceGrabber co-brands that have popped up over the years… TechBargains, DealCatcher, Got|Apex, and numerous others, all have PriceGrabber co-brand partners.
While having a co-brand is a step up from completely sending your hard-earned visitor away from your site completely, it is still very limiting. For the first time, with the recent development of the e-commerce APIs and the Web 2.0 transition, the opportunity exists to blend the two, leaving the end-user, the consumer, relying on only one site.
Watch out deal sites, the future is here…
The original concept behind SecretPrices.com was to fully integrate deal and coupon information into price comparison listings to ensure the consumer knows how to receive the lowest price. While the technology is still in its infant stages, I am proud to announce we are one step closer to fully achieving this! Product deals whether as simple as a product price drop, or as complex as combing a collection of rebates, coupons, or other promotional discounts, have been integrated directly into the product page listings of SecretPrices.com (view deals section here).
An example “product deal” can be seen on the Hitachi MD6GB-BP 6 GB Hard Drive product page. First, take a minute and view this product on a Price Comparison engine (eg. Shopping.com or PriceGrabber)… 
You’ll see the lowest price from J&R, offering it for $169.99 on Shopping.com, and $159.99 from ZipZoomFly on PriceGrabber (not including StoreFront offerings). What it doesn’t tell you is that Dell is offering the same product for $179.99 with a $50 rebate. Oh yeah, and Dell also has a $20 coupon code until mid-April. Put the savings together and that is $70 off (dropping the price to about $110), a full $50 cheaper than the lowest price on a comparison engine listing. Doesn’t it give you a good feeling knowing all that?
How does the consumer benefit?
Comparison shopping is popular because it saves people time and effort from “site-hopping” to check prices. It’s no secret that savvy-bargain hunters still look further for coupons, rebates or other discounts. This means still having to site hop, producing extra work and extra time for the user. Read more »
Comments(0) Mix ‘06 hosted by Microsoft just recently took place at the end of March… But here are some more upcoming events related to e-commerce, web services, and affiliate marketing:
eComXpo
April 4th to 6th
The show is hosted virtually on the Internet.
Affliliates on ABestWeb discuss it here
More Info
eBay Developers Conference
June 10th to 12th
Las Vegas, NV
More Info
Affiliate Summit 2006 East
July 9th to 11th
Orlando, FL
More Info
Mashup Camp 2
Where and When have not yet been determined.
I’m planning on attending as many as I can make time for.Anyone attending these or other events?
Technorati Tags: ebay, affiliate summit, affiliate marketing, mashup, developers, EcomXpo
