Deal alerter: The real deal
Price-comparison Web sites, sometimes called shop-bots, are a great tool for the savvy consumers. At places like Google Product Search, MySimon and PriceGrabber, you can instantly compare prices for a wide host of products.
A new Web site, launched this week by my friend Edgar Dworsky of ConsumerWorld.org, is called Deal Alerter. It goes one step further than the shop-bots. Here’s a description from a news release:
Bargain hunters no longer have to repeatedly check and recheck prices for the same item, such as a particular flat panel TV, GPS, or digital camera. Deal Alerter does it for them automatically. It then emails an alert to the shopper when the item they want to buy drops to the price they want to pay. Here is how it works:
- The shopper picks an item and checks its current price range.
- If prices seem too high, he or she can set a lower target
price.
- The site automatically rechecks store prices daily, and then
sends the shopper an email alert if prices drop to or below their
target price.
When you try it out, you’ll see Deal Alerter is built using the PriceGrabber shop-bot. For some reason, my eye had trouble finding the link “Set Price Alert.” But it’s there. It’s just above the “User Reviews” with the red stars. You’ll have to register an e-mail address with PriceGrabber to use Deal Alerter.
