Sunday, June 26, 2011

Want to know when the best time is to buy?

Before we had Internet we went to a small store and did let us explain from the sales person why and which product we should buy. Many times we took their advice, but we drove to the next super store outside of town to buy exactly the item we want some few $$ cheaper than in the small local store.

Then came the Internet. We still went to the local store to get as much as possible info, and then we went online to buy our new stereo. We might have used Amazon or pricegrabber to find the best price.










These websites do a good job to compare prices but they have two problems. First they use feeds they get from the retailers which means many times the prices are not really valid anymore and they don't help us to predict when the best time is to buy.

This changed now with decide.com










Decide.com is not relying on 3rd party feeds. Their system is crawling all the rimes certain retailers to ensure to get the latest price.

Few of the founders were former owner or employees of farecast.com which got bought from Microsoft in 2008. Farecast was a travel side which did predict changes in flight costs. Farecast claims according to a third-party audit of their predictive technology, they are about 75% accurate and on average, customers will save over $50 on a typical round-trip transaction.

The same prediction software is used with decide.com. Decide works right now only with TV, computers and cameras.
Decide tells you if the price will fall (with a confidence level), if a new model is coming out and when a new model is expected.

The main product page shows the lowest price and will link to the company which had the lowest price. If multiple companies have the same price then it takes the first one in alphabetic order.

Clicking on "Prices" will bring the browser to the lower part of the website where you can see 5 compares at the same time. Really nice is, that the grid shows taxes and shipping costs as separate columns.









Decide is a great tool. But you can't buy products at decide.com. You will be redirected to the reseller of your choice. In one case the item I was looking for was out of stock and decide.com was not aware of it.

The website is nicely done for iPad, I would like to see an iPad app but do not really miss it, because the website is ok. However I don't like all these popups when navigating to vendors product page. With iPad it gets annoying because you don't have tabs (not yet). It has a complete Facebook and twitter integration which can only help.

Overall it is a great concept but it needs more categories. Phones and tablets would be perfect for decide.com











These people seem to be big Apple fans, when I searched for blackberry or galaxy tab, I got info back that neither phone or tablet category exist and guess, the I,ages shown wad the iPhone and iPad. However in their search seems not macmall.com included which many times cheaper than anybody.

Another kickback is the low amount of products.
There are only 85 notebooks, 268 televisions and 68 cameras in the system, but on the other hand why more per category?

Decide.com has a great future, if they can offer more categories where products are changing price all the time. However it is a little different than booking flights. I electronic the price goes usually down and seldom up. Flights are more tailored round seasons and depend on the gas price a lot.

But still it is good to see when we should not buy a product because a newer model comes out. Because then we can either buy the new model or pay less for old model.

Cars would be a good example as well, I am so tired to talk to car sales people that I would love to find the best price online and then just go to the dealer to finalize the deal.


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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

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