There are literally hundreds of sites out there claiming they offer the best deals, and cheapest prices on the net. New startup dealighted recently threw down its gauntlet and made its way into this arena as well. So how does it stack up to the competition?
What dealighted brings to the table
dealighted is built around 2 concepts.
- It aggregates hot deals from a few popular deal sites
- It pulls up related deals when you search for an item
Displays Hot Deals?
The site aggregates user contributed deals (around 650 or so each day) posted to sites like Slickdeals, Fatwallet, and Anandtech, and identifies those deals that are the most popular (usually around 125). As soon as a popular deal is identified, the deal appears at the top of dealighted’s homepage.
Now this is fine if you’re just browsing around trying to find something interesting in general, but because you cannot filter the items by category, you end up looking at a page which has deals for a TV, T-shirt, and a quilt - hardly an ideal shopping experience.
Related Deals?
When you search for an item, you are brought to a page where it shows online retailing prices on the left, and extra related deals on the right. Sounds good - but does it really work well?
The acid test:
- Step 1: Check the top selling MP3 player and camera on Amazon
- Step 2: Check relevance of deals offered
- Step 3: Check the prices vs other popular search pricing engines
Results:
- Step 1: Most Popular MP3 player: 30 GB iPod Video & Most Popular Camera : Canon PowerShot SD800
- Step 2: The related deals displayed had many iPod and Cannon related products, but in terms of giving me deals for that exact product - 0 out of 10 deals was for the correct iPod, and 1 out of 10 deals was for correct camera.
- Step 3: Because it was picking out prices from key Internet retailers, prices were competitive vs other shopping sites
Bottom Line
Overall, dealighted has failed to blow me away but I do however think it’s a nice concept and you have to give them points for trying something new.
If you’re interested in finding good places to shop online you can check out my post on the top 5 ways to maximize your shopping experience.
Disclaimer: dealighted has paid me to review their service, and to give an honest opinion. Please note that all opinions expressed in this post are completely my own, and have not been influenced by dealighted in any way.
April 18th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
Here’s a comment which was emailed to me by Scott, the founder of dealighted…
James,
A few comments about your review.
You said, “Step 2: The related deals displayed had many iPod and Cannon related products, but in terms of giving me deals for that exact product - 0 out of 10 deals was for the correct iPod, and 1 out of 10 deals was for correct camera. Highly disappointing”
You have to keep in mind: there isn’t always going to be a posted/matching deal for every product every day. There are no currently available deals for the Canon SD800 because no one has posted a deal for that product to Slickdeals, Fatwallet, Gottadeal, or Anandtech, in the past several days (there are a total of about 1,800 posted deals in the past 3 days). But I think this page ( http://shop.dealighted.com/sf-1/pid-36736809) gives you a great list of deals for very similar cameras like the SD1000, which is a comparable camera.
The same is true for the iPod Video. There just aren’t any current deals for that exact product within the past few days, so the system shows you deals for similar products that might interest you.
As for filtering, we don’t have a categories system in place as of yet, but the search box in the upper right corner makes it easy to find deals and coupons that match any keyword or category, like digital cameras, camcorders, plasma, watches, etc:
http://www.dealighted.com/main?search=plasma
http://www.dealighted.com/all?search=camcorder
http://www.dealighted.com/all?search=newegg
Thanks,
Scott
April 18th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
To which my response would be…
There should be a clear indication that no deals are found for the product and these are related deals only, so I don’t have to scroll through many pages thinking I’d find a deal for the correct product.
As for categories, you have a point, but the lack of a theme of any sort does make the front page look a bit too unfocused. Once registered, I would like to able to apply filters to certain types of items only so my front page is always relevant
December 29th, 2007 at 1:53 am
We invite you to visit http://www.combyo.com for aggregated deals from all the top deal sites that include Slickdeals, fatwallet, dealcatcher, deals2buy, dealplumber, dealsplus, bensbargains, techbargains and many more, all in one place. All deals are automatically categorized and can be sorted by different price ranges. Most of the deals are shown with image (smart image matching logic). The value add with every deal - Combyo dynamically retrieves price comparison info for every deal on a real time basis. Customers can choose to sign up for alerts on deal or any specific product they are shopping for. Same/Related deals from different sites have been rolled up into one single view.
March 14th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Is there someway to quickly and easily create my own custom deals page somewhere? I am mostly interested in fashion and home deals which I have found the most of on http://www.unodeals.com . Other websites too have the occasional home deals so I don’t want to miss out on them either.