Bountii - New YC Startup | Hacker News Reader

Bountii - New YC Startup

bountii.com

23 pointsbyrneseyeview29 comments

Linked on paulgraham.com

Deal-scouring isn't a new idea by any means. Nonetheless, I've been playing around with it, and I'm very much impressed with the speed and ease of use of the service. Well done.

One suggestion though that may or may not be helpful at this point. Perhaps when a user searches, you can have a "short list" that lists the most popular products in that search, so that the search can be narrowed to a single product.

For instance, when I type "bluetooth headset," a short list of headset models could come up on top of the results. When I click on one, it limits it to, say, H700.

Also, I searched for "Playstation 3." I was looking for the console, but got one console result and a bunch of games. Perhaps categories like "Playstation 3 Console," "Playstation 3 Games," "Playstation 3 Accessories," etc.

The former would be much easier to do than the latter I'd imagine, but both types would be helpful.

Right now, you'll find that our results for relatively specific searches (e.g. LG 42" Plasma - http://www.bountii.com/search.php?item=lg+42%22+plasma&s...) are really good.

However, like you mentioned, a broader search- "Playstation 3", yields more than consoles. We're working hard to improve the quality of our results for broad searches like this. For now, we decided to make the price filter very accessible to people. When you get back more than consoles for your "Playstation 3" search, we hope you'll narrow your results to those "> $200" to skip over the games and accessories.

The price filter isn't always good enough though. For instance, searching for "laser printer" brings up printers and cartridges, but on the low end of the price scale the prices are similar. Could you improve the search so that adding "-cartridge" eliminates cartridge results?

Really nice product search engine though. I got great results for the Nokia N800.

Instead of just listing what the top searches are, why not put pictures of the top items and their prices on the front page? People like pictures. Pictures are pretty.

As long as you only show a few of them and still have the search box as the most prominent thing on the page, it shouldn't end up being too cluttered.

This is incredibly superficial feedback - the gradients on those two dots over the i's really make me cringe. Just make them solid green.

Dots are now solid green. Thanks for the suggestion!

whether or not the idea itself is impressive the technology seems to be very much so. The sight is lightning quick for what it does.

Yes! I was stunned by the speed. Maybe one of these days, you'll share your secret (if there is one).

Lightning quick isn't hard if you just put everything in RAM, and RAM is so cheep these days.

Take half a day and learn about SEO.,, It could be a pretty huge driver of traffic and customer acquisition if you guys tweaked a few things. Drop me a line if you'd a few SEO bits of advice. (no, I'm not a consultant)

It seems to have the same drawback like all similar sites I've seen, s.a. Froogle, etc.

I search for Dell Inspiron Laptop and the first pages only contain batteries and accessories. I guess if you sort by price it will always happen like that. You'd either need to label products according to what category they actually are, or just throw out results that are clearly ridiculous: $5 for a laptop.

For your particular search, "Dell Inspiron Laptop", I would expect our current product to return a bunch of batteries and accessories. Only because Dell sells computers like J. Crew sells clothes. That is, if you want to buy a J. Crew Sweater, your best bet is to walk into a J. Crew store.

Sony is a different case. You'll see their systems at many retailers. So, if you search "Sony Vaio"- http://bountii.com/search.php?item=sony+vaio , you'll find our results are more than adequate.

The major strength of current product is that it is great at finding the best prices for people who know what they want. We're in the process of improving our browsing capability as that's the way a lot of people like to shop. And, since we also want that to be one of our big strengths, we'll have to include "Dell Inspiron Laptops" from Dell in our index.

-John

I know this is cliche, but it wouldn't hurt to add social networking capabilities. This is actually an idea of mine I applied to YC with two cycles ago. It was a social network for product reviews and product prices where users would gather in interest groups (gaming pc's, music rigs) and bookmark the products they have, or want, on their profiles. Users would then jump from user to user to see what set up others are using. Each product would have it's own page with a rating, reviews, and scour the internet for the best prices. Not only would you index new products by scouring the net, but users would be motivated to find new products and submit them to your site.

More realistically, however, I think a feature that allows users to bookmark products and receive alerts when new lower prices have been found would increase stickiness. Imagine a user coming to your site, bookmarking a product and sort of forgetting about it, only to find an email alert telling them a lower price has been found, and they're back.

We did something trivial along those lines and added a Facebook icon to our product pages. If you like a product, you can click the Facebook icon and the product name, image, price and store will show up in your "Posted Items". Yes, nothing spectacular, but we like it :)

-John

Just to throw out an idea, why not track historical prices and graph them in the same manner that finance websites graph stock prices? People do this all the time, but don't really have a tool for it. Seems like it would be fun, and (if it caught on) would result in an awful lot of repeat visitors.

...of course, it would be trivially easy for google to reproduce that.

Search 1: oral-b sonic complete toothbrush Google: http://www.google.com/products?q=oral-b+sonic+complete+tooth... Bountii: http://bountii.com/search.php?item=oral-b+sonic+complete+too...

Search 2: oral-b sonic complete toothbrush head Google: I got 2-3 links to eBay and couple of other sites Bountii: No results found

Search 3: gillette MACH3 razor Google: http://www.google.com/products?q=gillette+MACH3+razor&bt... Bountii: No results found

Edit: I know these searches may not be the most popular searches. But still these are not hard to find products...

Hi Karthik- Thanks for including those searches!

Currently we index prices for consumer electronics. If you look at products in this category, you'll find our results are better than our competitors- Google Products, Pricegrabber, Yahoo Shopping, etc.

-John

Hey John - That explains the results I got. Maybe you should include this information in the homepage. But otherwise I like the way the results are presented and the feeds (Google still doesn't have this).

Just a thought, but why not implement a clustering algorithm to disambiguate products in the search results? Suffix tree clustering should get you pretty close...

Are there any product search engines which do this yet? I know froogle doesn't, but proper disambiguation seems like it could be a killer feature if done right.

The site looks good and does what it says. But I compared a few products with Google Products search (formerly Froogle) and I got more deals from Google than Bountii. Of course, you don't have a large index as Google (yet), but ultimately the question is how is it different from Google Products?

Can you include links to the searches you tried? A lot of product search sites seem to have lower prices than Bountii because they don't include shipping. (This happened with the test searches Techcrunch did, and they mistakenly concluded that Bountii was not the best.)

Maybe the Bountiis should break down the prices into product and shipping when they display them...

To give another data point, before reading your comment I tried "50" plasma" on Bountii and the best I got was 999 (http://www.bountii.com/search.php?item=50%22+plasma&subm...)

I did the same search on froogle http://www.google.com/products?q=50%22+plasma&btnG=Searc... and found this: http://www.jepago.com/store/view-item.php?p=834.6&src=F3... and thought "Well, 834 sure beats 999" I did see the hefty shipping charge but I didn't see the zip code option until you mentioned it. It seems obvious enough once you see it but I think the results are too eye grabbing to get everyone noticing it by accident.

Overall I think Bountii had much better results once I got past all the mounts and brackets and stands. Relative to froogle bountii does a much better job of sticking to results that actually matter (froogle had a nice price for a plasma in Yorkshire and for one that didn't turn on).

My experience was I clicked on the 1000-7000 filter and got nine clean results and great prices from reliable vendors (at least in the sense that newegg >> jepago?) but i just wasn't sure that i wasn't missing out on a TV at 930 without doing some more less pleasant digging. I did figure out pretty quickly I could do a price highest to lowest search on < 1000 and make sure it was just false positives below but maybe there's a way to make that a little more intuitive.

I think it's really important to get the users clear on the shipping taxes thing so here's my proposed solution. On the front page immediately to the left of the search box put a two item checkbox labeled "with shipping" and "without shipping" with "without shipping" pre-checked. Then everyone knows 1. the prices don't include shipping 2. the prices could include shipping if you want. If the user clicks the "with shipping box" it expands to be the zip code text box. This way 1 and 2 get done but it still only takes typing+enter to get to the results if you don't want shipping. It avoids asking for the zipcode on the front page which might come off as creepy unless you know what it's for.

Thanks so much for taking time to do a thorough write up of our product!

"nine clean results and great prices from reliable vendors"... This is exactly the experience we want people to have when they use Bountii. Shoppers shouldn't have to spend 12 hours figuring out whether to give nearly $1000 to a vendor like Jepago (2/10 rating on resellerratings.com), when they can pay the same amount or less for the same product from a top retailer like Newegg.

Based on your feedback and others, we are working to make ZIP code entry more prominent, as it's something everyone should be using everytime they visit Bountii.

-John

Price breakdowns are coming soon!

Everyone would be amazed if they knew just how often the major shopping engines showed them incorrect data, especially for tax and shipping.

Are you also planning to include ebay results?

bountii offers better prices on zunes fwiw

Hey guys -- very slick implementation... I'm wondering though, what is the major differentiating factor from what's out there already?

It's lightning fast & the UI is incredibly clean; that could be enough right there.

We do a few things to show our shoppers prices that other engines cannot: 1. We pay users to submit pricing information. This ensures that our price index is complete as there are some things that cannot be automated. 2. We show you all the hidden prices ("Click to See", "Add to Cart", etc) from all of our stores. 3. We include rebate and coupon savings in prices.

-John

Damn

http://bountii.com/search.php?item=blow+job&submit.x=0&#...

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