

Ask HN: Idea on Crowdsourced Deal Hunting - dryicerx

Just bouncing a idea around, let me know your thoughts.<p>* Background: User wants to a buy a product, Laptop XYZ, best price he finds is $1900, wants better.<p>* Idea/Solution: User visits website, says they want New XYZ Laptop for $1800.<p>* 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.<p>* Finish: The original user gets the product at the requesting price $1800. The deal hunter keeps the difference $1750.<p>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.<p>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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byoung2
Maybe you could set it up so that the buyer clicks on your affiliate link for
the product, and you kick back a percentage to the deal hunter?

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dryicerx
Ah yes, instead of the difference using a % good idea. The trick is probably
convincing the actually seller to give out a certain percentage back for the
referral.

Definitely makes things easier for the Buyer.

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byoung2
If you sign up for LinkShare and Commission Junction, you'll have thousands of
retailers covered, so you should be able to find most products and collect
1-15% in referral fees. Here's how I would set it up:

    
    
      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

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bdmac97
Isn't Amazon (or Newegg) the cheapest place to buy pretty much anything like
that online already?

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adrianwaj
check out <http://bit.ly/Lw6Id> \- I know who developed this site, in Israel

