Ask HN: Idea on Crowdsourced Deal Hunting

5 pointsdryicerx5 comments

Just bouncing a idea around, let me know your thoughts.

* Background: User wants to a buy a product, Laptop XYZ, best price he finds is $1900, wants better.

* Idea/Solution: User visits website, says they want New XYZ Laptop for $1800.

* Internal: Crowd-sourced people or outlets/stores can look at requested product/price and see if they can match it. Someone finds a deal for $1750.

* Finish: The original user gets the product at the requesting price $1800. The deal hunter keeps the difference $1750.

Current issues: How to handle the money/item transaction. One way is for the service it self to charge the difference first before revealing the original deal site.

If you are interested in this problem and want to work on it, contact me. (Just trying a open approach see what happens).

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1. Sign up with affiliate networks (LinkShare and Commission Junction, etc.) 2. Set up website to allow people to post product price requests 3. As requests come in, automatically create Amazon Mechanical Turk HITs to search for product and price 4. Use affiliate API or have outsourced team (India, Philippines, etc.) create link for product. 5. Reply to user (a la Priceline.com) or post to site that you have found their price, and display link or require registration to get link, whatever you decide works