

Ask HN: Review our startup - BeatMyPrice.com - bufferout
http://beatmyprice.com/

======
apsurd
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.

~~~
bufferout
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.

------
mstefff
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..

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

------
truebosko
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.

------
vaksel
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

~~~
bufferout
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.

~~~
apsurd
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?

~~~
bufferout
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.

------
unalone
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?

------
aneesh
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.

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

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

