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Ask HN: Idea on Crowdsourced Deal Hunting

5 points by dryicerx 17y ago

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).

byoung2 17y ago
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?
- dryicerx 17y ago
  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.
  - byoung2 17y ago
    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
bdmac97 17y ago
Isn't Amazon (or Newegg) the cheapest place to buy pretty much anything like that online already?
adrianwaj 17y ago
check out http://bit.ly/Lw6Id http://bit.ly/Lw6Id - I know who developed this site, in Israel

5 points by dryicerx 17y ago

byoung2 17y ago

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?

dryicerx 17y ago
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.
- byoung2 17y ago
  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

bdmac97 17y ago

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

adrianwaj 17y ago

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