diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'old/published/social shopping/social-shoppingv2.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | old/published/social shopping/social-shoppingv2.txt | 1 |
1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/old/published/social shopping/social-shoppingv2.txt b/old/published/social shopping/social-shoppingv2.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5cf481c --- /dev/null +++ b/old/published/social shopping/social-shoppingv2.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +
maybe needs something more descriptive at the top (i put in a marker) along the lines of "tell it what you're shopping for and it tells you where you can find the best deal. ask it to keep you updated and it will send you text messages, emails, smoke signals whenever the price goes down at any of the web's biggest e-tailers."
that's probably necessary even if you end up turning it into a "news" story. but the quotes about how this is totally going to change online shopping for everyone belong above that description if you get some good ones.
try to de-personalize it. change you --> users throughout. i did this in some sections that i edited, but i left other sections untouched, so read it through.
also, if it's re-written as a news story, you might have to cut one. which one would you cut?
With the holiday season in full swing, more and more of us are using the web as an oversized shopping mall. Thankfully, the rise of Web 2.0 technologies has given birth to a new breed of shopping site that can search and scour the web for the best deals.
Sites like Offertrax, Stylefeeder, Mpire and Boddit don't sell anything at all. Rather, they aim to improve our web purchasing intelligence by doing our bargain hunting for us and telling us when to swoop in for the kill.
_descripto here_
The most sophisticated of these new sites is Offertrax, an innovative online shopping service that combines the familiar features of social bookmarking tools with RSS feeds to help users track potential online purchases.
_or here_
Offertrax users create "tracks," or simple collections of bookmarks pointing to products found on the web.
On the suface, Offertrax has the same functionality as del.icio.us or other social bookmarking sites. However, the site also provides notifications via RSS whenever prices change or special offers are available.
Offertrax checks all of its customer's tracks every hour, sending out price change notifications whenever it encounters them. If a shopper doesn't use an RSS reader, the notifications are available on the company's website.
In addition to bookmarks Offertrax, lets users add reviews, notes and control whether or a track is public or private. Offertrax's price tracking service is currently still in beta.
Stylefeeder is a shopping community site that also borrows some ideas from the world of social bookmarking sites. Unlike Offertrax, which tracks a user's items privately, Stylefeeder hosts a searchable public community for shoppers.
Rather than trying to maintain a wishlist on Amazon, Yahoo and others, Stylefeeder allows you to condense everything in one place.
Stylefeeder offers a nice bookmarklet for your browser's toolbar. When you're on a site that has something you'd like to buy, just click the bookmarklet and it will be saved to your Stylefeed. Images and descriptions can be assigned to each item in a user's Stylefeed.
Stylefeeder doesn't offer RSS price updates like Offertrax, but the community around the site has built a searchable database full of reviews and tips.
Mpire, another big player online shopping. Mpire is a destination site in its own right, but for consumers the real draw may well be the recently released Firefox plugin.
Rather than trying to track prices from the site (which you can also do if you like), the plugin allows you to take the power of Mpire's price comparison tools to any site you visit. The plugin essentially put the MPire site data just a click away from nearly any shopping site.
Once installed, clicking the Mpire plugin tool will pop up a small bar at the bottom of your screen that compares prices, offers review links and other tools for the item on the page you're browsing. Similar to Farecast, the airline price comparison site, there are predictive graphs in the Mpire plugin indicating whether the price of an item is likely to go up or down based past sales.
Unfortunately, right now the Plugin is only available for Firefox, but hopefully we'll see something similar for Internet Explorer and other Browsers in the near future.
Boddit is another new bargain shopping site that's one part search engine, one part price tracker.
Boddit works by pulling in prices from a number of big internet discount trackers like Dealnews, Slickdeals, Fatwallet and many more. Rather than searching all those sites individually, Boddit lets you search them all at once.
Boddit also offers what they call "web search, Boddit-style" which amounts to creating a frame with a toolbar on the left of your browser window and performing searches of other sites in another frame. Normally I hate anything that creates frames in my browser, but Boddit’s was actually helpful and made searching multiple sites much quicker.
For instance with a single click I was able to jump from searching Pricegrabber to Froogle to Yahoo! Shopping and more. Unfortunately because Boddit apparently sends the search info as POST data, you back button will warn you about resubmitting a form, which is annoying, but worth the trade off in my opinion.
Boddit will also search and browse auctions on Ebay, Half.com and Yahoo! Auctions and even Craig’s List.
All these sites and other like them offer you tools to improve your internet shopping experience and in the end none is really better than the other, simply different. Your best bet might be to combine them all and create your own ultimate shopping experience. After all, when it comes to deciding how to spend your hard-earned cash you can use all the tricks you can find.
\ No newline at end of file |