Paribus Can Save You Money When Online Prices Drop | Hacker News Reader

Paribus Can Save You Money When Online Prices Drop

techcrunch.com

32 pointsErrorcod39 comments

Love the idea but feel uncomfortable giving such a young company the ability to read all my email and also send messages on my behalf.

Would much prefer if they supported the option to forward relevant messages to them, TripIt style. One can always create auto-forwarding filters for, say, all Amazon order confirmations.

Great seeing Paribus on HN! I really appreciate the feedback. This is definitely the biggest challenge that we're facing but we hope that as the user base grows we will gain legitimacy and convince people that we're out there to defend their interests. Obviously, we're taking all the precautions necessary, following security best practices, and collaborating with Context.io to keep everyone's mailbox secure.

On your second point, we could (and probably will) enable the feature of forwarding receipts eventually and but the reason we haven't done it is to keep the whole experience as seamless as possible - We want our users to do ZERO work - and we would still need to send the automated claims on their behalf. Sending users price drop alerts is just like giving them work to do (camelcamelcamel.com and plenty of other services do this).

What about providing people with a pass through email address to use on shopping sites? A nice value add there would be having the option to give a unique email address to each site to track who's fault spam is (I've been paying sneakemail for that for at least a decade).

Slice (https://www.slice.com/) is a more mature startup that does the same thing. It was recently acquired by Rakuten.

Hi calcsam!

Eric w/ Paribus here. Slice does some similar things (track purchases via email, promise to send price drop alerts, etc.).

I wanted to love their product when I first used it, but found myself dissatisfied for a few reasons: 1. I personally have never actually received a price drop alert. (Could just be me, but many items that I've bought since being a member have dropped in price) 2. Just receiving a price drop alert leaves a lot of user pain. You still have to take the time to go back/forth with customer service for unclear benefit (not all price drop claims work), and for most price drops it simply isn't worth the hassle. 3. Most importantly, their actual revenue-driving business is fundamentally different: http://intelligence.slice.com/ Your data is the product that they sell to advertisers (and likely use for Rakuten, a major Asian eCommerce player and owner of Buy.com).

We designed our business to make money only when we make you money first. Its a small but important difference, but we think that aligning our interests fully with our users will make all the difference in making our product far more useful for consumers in the long run.

*>"The startup has a small, undisclosed amount of friends and family funding and isn’t actively fundraising."

Read: "we are open to accepting money at a very favorable valuation now that you've read this on TC." They're obviously in a position of strength here, but this seems pretty transparent.

We've been working with these guys for several months now and the savings are pretty massive. On Amazon, in our experience, about 5-10% of purchases will qualify for a refund. It's a set-and-forget type service, so you literally don't have to do anything after signing up.

The service is brilliant. It's a set it and forget it app which has already sent me four refunds. I recommend it to all my friends, especially those that frequently shop online or use Amazon Prime.

Links seriously need to be able to be flagged specifically as advertisements.

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