Yesterday saw the launch of the brand new startup PriceAdvice, which has a unique twist on the concept of deal hunting. Not only does the self-proclaimed “virtual blue book” site give you an overview of what the typical price range is on the device you’re looking for by combining information from a variety of different sites, PriceAdvice also provides you with links to online deals for those products. The information sources range from typical shopping sites like Amazon to auction sites like eBay to classifieds sites like Craigslist. All you see is the currently available price, next to what PriceAdvice’s research indicates is “Expensive” or a “Great Price”. Price Advice has already done all the comparison shopping for you.
The site has an extremely simple and easy to use homepage, with only a search bar, a scrolling list of “Best Deals”, and tabs for categories. At launch, the site only has categories for Watches, Tablets, and Everything Else, but they say more are coming soon.
Unfortunately, while the concept is elegant, the execution leaves something to be desired. Every item on the site is accompanied by a bell curve. The graph appears to indicate the range of prices, but it’s just a bell curve graph with a couple of loosely placed numbers and no details (you don’t even find out exactly what the border is between great, fair, and expensive prices). There’s also a line connecting the current price to the peak of the graph. It seems to indicate that this is the current typical price, but the numbers tell a different story. I’ve already seen examples where the current price is below the great price, but that line still points right at the middle of the graph.
There’s also an indicator of how far the market price is down (it doesn’t say over what time period, but it seems to be compared to the suggested retail price). Because the site lists results in order of price and defaults to auctions, the top results on the site are generally eBay auctions with 0 bids and a current price of $0.01. So, the market price is almost always down 100% on the first page of results. You can switch to Buy It Now prices, Deals on New Items, or sort and filter results differently, but at that point you’re losing much of the simplicity that is supposed to be PriceAdvice’s hallmark.
The biggest problem I found in my brief look at PriceAdvice, however, is that it doesn’t reliably find the best price. For a site that’s whole purpose is to save the trouble of price shopping, this is almost unforgivable. What’s worse, finding a better deal wasn’t difficult. Their homepage’s Best Deals section currently includes a black WiFi iPad (16 GB) for $425. Google Shopping turned up one for $387 (and in the top 5 results that show up from searching regular Google, no need to go to the shopping results page). Even Best Buy had it for $400. If you can’t find as good a deal on common consumer electronics than the best known brick-and-mortar electronics retailer, you’re missing something.
Today is still early days for PriceAdvice, so room for improvement is not a surprise. But for now, I’m shopping elsewhere.
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