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Offertrax, an innovative online shopping service, announced its public beta earlier today. Offertrax uses a combination of social bookmarking tools and RSS to help you track your online shopping.
Offertrax allows you to create what it call's "tracks." Tracks are bookmarks you make on products you interested in. Taking a tip from the social bookmarking scene offers a bookmarklet that allows you to add any page to your tracks with a single click.
Once you sign up, just drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar and go find a product you'd like to track. Click the bookmarklet and Offertrax will take ask you to give the bookmark a title, description and a choice of images to represent the product. You can then add the bookmark to any of your existing tracks, or create a new track.
In addition to bookmarks Offertrax lets you add reviews, notes and control wether or not your tracks are public.
So far it sounds pretty much like del.icio.us, but here's the difference: Offertrax gives you an RSS feed and will send you announcement whenever prices change or special offers are available. Offertrax sends out bots once an hour to check all the bookmarks in your tracks. If they find a change you'll be notified in your RSS reader (or on the site obviously).
Offertrax's bots did a great job with Amazon, but weren't able to find prices for some of the smaller sites I bookmarked.
Offertrax is a great time saver and looks very promising, but there are a number of features I would like to have seen. For one thing there doesn't seem to be an immediately obvious way to see other people's tracks. There are links to leave comments when you view your own profile so obviously there must be a way to do this for other people's tracks as well, but I couldn't figure out how to do it.
Also, while Offertrax lets you add reviews, the reviews are intended to be you doing the reviewing. That's fine and I like that, but what if I want to collect other reviews from around the web? I'd like to see is a way to bookmark existing reviews and add then to my tracks. For instance, if I'm sopping for new camera, I'd like to have all my camera bookmarks be joined with bookmarks to reviews on say dpreview.com in the same track container. That way I could see my research and track products all in one interface. As it is the track feature is the only dynamic off-site feature.
But Offertrax is in beta and I'm sure that they'll be adding new features in the future.
Offertrax is also offering it's services to online retailers in the form of a "track this" badge which can be added to the bottom of any page. Curious customers who might otherwise abandon the page can click the track this button and they'll be prompted to create an Offertrax account and start tracking that merchant. The pitch to merchants is that Offertrax can help them convert browsing customers into actively watching customers, which probably sounds good to retailers.
I suppose the cynical might point out that Offertrax stands to learn a lot about your online shopping habits, which is ture and there's no doubt that if the service catches Offertrax will have some valuable market statics at it's disposal. But in the end there's really no way to connect your Offertrax account to the final purchase so your privacy should be relatively secure.
Overall Offertrax is solid offering and well timed with the Holiday shopping season nearly upon us.
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