For many online shoppers, no sooner have they hit the “buy” button than they’re struck by angst over whether they missed out on a better deal at another site. But at BeatThat.com, a consumer electronics shopping site that emerged from beta testing yesterday, there’s less reason to worry: the site digs up the Web’s best deals on camcorders, digital cameras, GPS devices, MP3 players, printers, and TVs by paying consumers for the information.
If you find a product advertised at a price that’s lower than the lowest one currently featured at BeatThat, the company will pay you $2.00. That way, “there’s an incentive for the deals to keep coming in until, quite frankly, you just can’t find a better one,” says David Parker, CEO of Cambridge, MA-based Digital Advisors, which created the site. “At that point, we can very confidently say we have the best prices on the Internet.”
Digital Advisors is a five-year-old, privately funded company that already operates a network of shopping websites, focused on high-definition TVs, digital cameras, satellite TV units, laptops, and camcorders. “All of those sites are doing fine. The concept is to help consumers make good choices,” says Parker, who was a co-founder of Bedford, MA-based SoundBite Communications and a business development executive at Viaweb (the maker of Web storefront software founded by Paul Graham, now of Y Combinator fame) and Direct Hit (a search engine acquired in 2002 by Ask Jeeves, now called Ask.com). “But about a year ago we decided that we wanted to try something different. We have a couple of people on our staff who are really good at sniffing out excellent prices, and a light bulb went off when we realized that the best prices we were showing on our sites, which were provided to us by an aggregation service, were never the best prices you could get.”
Parker knew there was a business model in attracting customers looking for price information on specific products, since they’re usually on the cusp of a major purchase, and e-retailers are willing to pay a commission for them—indeed, that’s how Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, and the plethora of other comparison-shopping sites make money. “So we came up with the concept for BeatThat, which would have a fixed inventory of products and would always have the best prices for those products,” he says.
The difference between BeatThat and the other shopping sites, Parker explains, is that every price shown on BeatThat has been submitted by a “Deal-Finder”—a person who’s an expert at sniffing out bargains. Like amateur commodities dealers, these contributors spend much of their spare time sifting through websites for discounted products that retailers themselves often aren’t highlighting. They also keep track of the confusing world of coupons, manufacturer rebates, and free shipping offers, which tend to change from day to day. To motivate inveterate bargain hunters to contribute their discoveries to BeatThat, the company set up its payment system, which is already netting several of the top Deal-Finders more than $1,000 a month, according to Parker.
“We didn’t want to rely on the merchants to tell us when the price is good,” Parker says. “We wanted to rely on the literal wisdom of the crowd. And if you have a large enough crowd looking for the best deals, you are going to find them.”
Anyone with an account at BeatThat can submit their product discoveries to the site; once the information is verified, Digital Advisor will put up to $2.00 into user’s account. Once a month, the accumulated funds are transferred into users’ Paypal accounts. After submitting three approved deals, a user is invited to become an official Deal-Finder.
But finding the absolute lowest prices on the Web comes with one big hazard: the best prices are often found
