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Ask HN: Review our startup - BeatMyPrice.com

beatmyprice.com

9 pointsbufferout13 comments

I really like the idea. The interface is very nice and friendly. Your presentation is excellent, which motivated me to test out the functionality ...

It doesn't work? If I understand the idea correctly, I am supposed to use the site to find a product I want at a lower price. But when I click on the tags, I am led to a mix of various loosely related products. I clicked "wii" expecting to find the best price on a wii, but instead i get a billion wii video games and wii accessories.

I understand the drawbacks to folksonomy, but ...it undermines your entire concept.

I feel like I'm just browsing a bunch of items, which is pretty boring.

There also needs to be refinement on the product lists. It might help the vagueness problem if you had links that filtered by brand or model. Also there are lot of products that are the same price, so you might need to batch them together.

Overall a useful concept, but tons of work left to actually execute.

Thanks for the feedback- sounds like we have some work to do around communicating the concept.

I'd suggest a use case where you find a product online somewhere and fill in the three large fields on the home page with its details. This is really key to the whole "beat my price" concept.

The tags are really just an overview of current popular search terms and aren't meant to be the focus of the functionality.

In your "wii" example if you adjust the 'target price' slider you should see different results depending on the price of the item you're after. E.g. accessories versus an actual Wii console.

Anyway, appreciate your feedback- definately take it to the team.

Awesome design - no doubt about it.

But seems broken and useless in terms of functionality..

Searched for the Dell Inspiron Mini... The first result is for a wireless PCI card. And the next 15 results are links to Dell's site with prices at or above what I asked.

Searched for Logitech Z-5500 Speakers... Results were relevant and did find cheaper products..

But some questions and problems:

1) How is this different than the tons and tons of other (much more comprehensive) comparison shopping and deal aggregation web sites?

2) Why is the page needed for the searching? The same results came without entering a web address.

3) Having to first go out and find information to bring back to your site is extremely annoying and seems pointless. You could just go to another shopping site once and do it all there. This seems like it would only (maybe) work as a browser plugin.

4) What API(s) are you using?

I think that is it..

Oh yes, and how is this at all people powered?

Wow, very cool. I just tried it on a product on our website (We are a Canadian retailer) and it worked!

I'm curious how are you crawling the web? As a small business, it doesn't find us unless I actually enter our url (even though we have decent rankings in Google for many of our products)

This would be neat to make as an API so retailers like myself could plug it into our stores websites.

seems to me that you are just grabbing the amazon and ebay feeds. The whole "submit a link with price" thing doesn't seem to work...and if it did that'd be ripe for abuse. PS3 for $1.99 linking to lemonparty

Assure you it does work, just the database does not reflect user submitted prices in real time.

We've considered the potential for abuse- the same concerns were voiced for retailmenot.com when we launched that too.

Thanks for your feedback.

Damn! You guys make beautiful designs! Do you guys have time for any commissioned work? I will have a need for a couple templates to skin my application (worth a try).

Anyway, I did what you suggested and entered a product specifically. So I do see the difference! The only thing is it seems likely that all products will likely be lowest on ebay.I submitted amazons page for an 8gig ipod touch and the first 10-15 results are all ebay... wouldn't this be the case for tons of products? Maybe filter auctions from standard pricing?

Sorry, way to busy for outside work. We'll definately take the compliment though! ;)

You can easily hide ebay listings (or any other merchant)- hover over the merchant name ("EBAY.COM") beneath the product title and you'll see what I mean.

Is the tag cloud really necessary? I agree with the people who've said that you make good designs, but tag clouds are inherently ugly. And I genuinely don't know: do they get many hits?

Interface is very nice. Well done.

The main challenge when doing this is the quality of the data, and that's where you still seem to have some issues. It's a hard problem though.

Uh, presuming the technology works and your data is good quality, how do you monetise this?

I like bugmenot and retailmenot. Not so much CushyCMS though.

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