Thalasar Ventures

I have spent some time re-factoring my old earlymiser/shopsort.com stuff. My first attempt at price comparison relied on a number of networks which created a maintenance problem. Maintaining that many web services was very little bang for a lot of buck, and it really didn’t serve the customer’s interests. Additionally it was a complete hassle getting users to set up pricing triggers as feeds. For those of you that don’t remember, you could set up an RSS feed for a specific product and then watch the price. Additionally you could also set up a specific trigger point for price and then have the application notify you. While that sounds good in the abstract, the UI wasn’t easy enough to use. There was also the problem that users’ don’t have enough information to make a reasonable trigger. Their prices were often so low, the trigger never got tripped. So this time I am effectively taking opposite track and using the web service more like a discount discovery. You simply select the top level category (click on the “Daily Deal” next to it), then select the percentage discount on the next screen. You can select a discount up to 80% and see what pops up. I am still wondering whether or not to go through the hassle of having the system generating RSS feeds that users can subscribe to. It seems to me it would be more useful to do a facebook app where the user would see what was the daily discounted deal in selected categories than generating RSS feeds. In any cause, poke around on it, ShopSort.com or EarlyMiser.com, it’s built on a single API (Shopzilla).

Update:Someone pointed out it might be helpful if I gave an example URL so people can understand how the discount discovery works. Here’s a link
Appliances at 60% discount. The system will then pull items that are discounted 60% or more off retail. The real sweet spot for finding deals is between 40-60%. At a 80% discount or higher you get a lot of items with artificially high list prices and low sale prices. To see different offers, simply select a discount level at the top center of the screen.
BSD

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The Super Bowl KickOff time is 6:29pm Eastern Time.