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All the comments on "don't rely on 1 customer" are correct, of course, but I'm more interested in how, as far back as the 80s, we all believed in the magic of h
by mwexler 11y ago
All the comments on "don't rely on 1 customer" are correct, of course, but I'm more interested in how, as far back as the 80s, we all believed in the magic of having something show us the best price for an item. Now, sure, it may often be Amazon, but not always, and they don't carry everything.
So, multiple price engines come and go. Why? Because consumers won't pay for them, and so they rely on kickbacks from merchants. Same for Travel sites/aggregators, and for review sites: You either get folks to pay for them (of which Angie's List was the only kind of success) or you get vendors to pay you (Yelp, any affiliate aggregator (Creditcards.com, etc.), price engines).
I guess I wonder: I love CamelCamelCamel, I loved PriceZombie, I loved PriceRunner and Jango and all the rest... but they keep going away. Google killed google shopping comparisons, as did the other portals. We can probably all think of ones we used that are all gone now.
What kind of service would one have to create that grabs prices but can charge consumers so it's not depending on affiliate vig? And given that many merchants are creating terms of service to block displaying of their prices (we see this also in the travel industry), will one of the earliest dreams of the internet, that of a flat marketplace where I can evaluate all players and their pricing and pick the best store for me, still fail to come to life?
It feels like online shopping has become a big mall, where I have to go to as many sites as I can find til I get tired and just buy the thing at the most recent site (or just trust that Amazon is the cheapest). I hope we can avoid this fate.
(Update: fixed typos)
- meritt 11y agoCamelCamelCamel has not went anywhere. But they also don't serve affiliate links as far as I can tell, so their revenue model (if they have one) is not dependent on an affiliate relationship.
- designtofly 11y agoCCC does serve affiliate links. If you go to any product page on CCC and click the "Buy" button, you'll end up at Amazon and the URL will have the "tag=camelproducts-20" for their affiliate code in the URL. I'm sure every Amazon-bound link on their website or browser plug-in will do the same.
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- dave2000 11y agoI guess the solution is to have a cheap to run web service which tracks prices and monetise it via ads rather than pretend you've got a real business that needs loads of employees and office space etc. But then I'm always amazed at how many employees and offices Twitter has.
- ikeboy 11y agoWhat's wrong with Google shopping? I've found deals using it, it's had greater than zero value for me. >What kind of service would one have to create that grabs prices but can charge consumers so it's not depending on affiliate vig? I've got a handful of ideas about this and have been considering a startup along these lines. I think that you need to take control of the actual purchase, so then it's just "Oh, I paid less than I expected, some may have gone to the middleman but I still win" instead of "I paid money to X for the purchase and to Y for finding it for me" and feel somehow losing out for not finding it yourself. If anyone wants to discuss this I added an email to my profile. This is kind of like what Jet was doing when they first launched, although they've stopped it since, apparently because stores didn't like it.
- MrApathy 11y ago> What's wrong with Google shopping? I've found deals using it, it's had greater than zero value for me. The Google shopping that exists today is not the same service that was originally launched. It used to function more like a standard search, but limited to all online stores. So long as there wasn't a robots.txt, Google was index the site and include the product in their shopping results. So basically like standard search, but with logic to determine if a site represented a store. Then Google modified shopping so that it was opt-in for the retailers, meaning a large number of stores were no longer included. To be included in Google shopping now a retailer must have a Google merchant/adwords account. It's more of a curated search now. Nothing wrong with it now, but it used to be great for finding hard-to-find items or items that were mispriced by less sophisticated retailers.
- ikeboy 11y agoI know that they moved to paid inclusion, but as I said, it's still useful. GP said it was "killed", and that seemed too much.
- mwexler 11y agoKilled from it's original vision; the remaining is a shadow of what it was. Big shadow, admittedly. But fair point, my hyperbole may have gotten out of control.