Review: Manually Dealighted automatically undelightedHmm Reviews, customer adventures, adfeed-services — by TDavid @ 10:57 pm PST
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Disclaimer: I’m being paid to write this review.
From the folks behind ResellerRatings.com, All Enthusiast, comes Dealighted.com a free, web-based service that launched on 11/15/2006 and bills itself as “a selection of today’s best deals many deal forums combined into one.”
Dealighted aggregates links to online shopping bargains from the following forums: Anandtech.com, FatWallet.com, GottaDeal.com, Slickdeals.net (Black Friday deals), Slickdeals.net (free stuff and hot deals). By visiting the site you’ll instantly get what they are trying to do: save you a step from scouring bargain posting sites directly.
Removing deals once they are no longer valid
One of the first things I saw today when visiting was a link to a Wii bundle pak from Wal-Mart but when I clicked through (twice, once to the forum link, and then again to the actual Wal-Mart ad) Wal-Mart was already sold out. Bummer. This goes with the territory, it’s a tough business doing a deal aggregation like this with time sensitive offers. It is possible by the time people see the deals they are already sold out.
Plasma HDTV giveaway on Black Friday 2006
Dealighted is celebrating their launch by giving away one Panasonic TH-50PX60U 50″ Plasma HDTV (with free shipping to the winner) on Black Friday (a $2,200 USD value). To enter the contest you only need to register for the site where they promise: “we will not spam you.” Registering also provides you with the ability to save deals, post comments, and email deals to friends. The form requires username, password, email address birthday and agreeing via checkbox to the Dealighted Terms of Service.
For a chance to win a Plasma TV, why not? However, since we don’t really know the people behind this site, I recommend using a non-important email address. Just. In. Case.
As a member of a family who believes in and regularly shops online, I’m all for ways to help find good deals and save money with online purchases, but first, are the Terms of Service a dealbreaker?
Notes on the Terms of Service
The section on “Best Viewing Practices” is strangely outdated:
This site makes use of dynamic HTML and is designed to display properly in Internet Explorer 5.0 and Netscape 6.0.
IE 5.0? Um, er, time to get with IE7 (at least 6.x), Firefox and Safari. The site does, in fact, render fine in IE7, Firefox 1.5.0.8 and Safari 2.0.4 (419.3). Otherwise the TOS looked normal, onto the Dealighted Privacy Policy.
Privacy Policy
The important section about how our emails will be used:
From time to time, we may email you to let you know about new site features no more frequently than once per month but generally only a few times per year. Your email address is never sold or otherwise provided to a 3rd party.
Sounded reasonable to me, I continued.
Checking out front page deals at random
Before registering I decided to check out a few deals on the front page at random. The topmost deal was for first season TV series at Amazon for under $10 USD. All listings are bolded until you click them and they look like this:
I’m kind of used to extra clicking with digg but still would rather go directly to the deal instead of a messageboard with a link to the deals, but that’s the way dealighted works. The details were on the forum and when I clicked through to Amazon the deal posted as an hour before was still live. I could get the following complete first season DVDs for under $10 each: ER, MADtv ($8.39), The Jamie Foxx Show ($8.39), Without a Trace ($8.39), Night Court, Murphy Brown, The Wayans Bros, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (First Season) $8.99 and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (Second Season) $8.99. All the links checked out and worked. I didn’t bother linking those up in this post because the deal is bound to be gone by the time you read this. We already have MADtv and ER and paid well over twice this price, not to mention the gas to go buy them from the store. Good deal.
Checked a few more deals on the home page.
The second link said Best Buy - PS3 so I clicked and learned that it was about how some Best Buy stores had PS3 in stock and explained how to get them to sell you one they were stockpiling for sale on Black Friday. Not sure if this was a deal, per se, more as somebody’s opinion on how you might get a store to sell you a heavy in demand item by talking to the store manager. Not a deal.
Here, see if you can figure out what’s wrong with this “smokin’ hot” deal in the picture below:
At least the shipping is free 
A woman’s perspective
I asked my wife, the perennial online shopper in our household to check out Dealighted and provide some feedback. She informed me that 90% of the presents currently under the tree have come via online shopping. She is a veteran online shopper so her perspective was important to me for this review. Here’s what she had to say:
1. duplicates posted, somewhat annoying
2. some links not working
3. positive: links change from big and bold to small and not bold when you have clicked on them
4. if you don’t want to go find good deals on your own this is pretty cool
5. search works good, I put in Amazon and it brought up all related items to Amazon
I asked her if she bookmarked Dealighted and would be returning and if so, how often? She said no to both questions. Why not? She has her “places she likes to shop regularly” and “those places [she] gets deals from directly.”
This struck me as the biggest obstacle for sites like dealighted to get over. Why wouldn’t people just go directly to the deal forums or encourage their favorite sites to notify them of deals directly?
Registered user features
Having the deals mashed up on a centralized page is only marginally convenient. Being able to set email or RSS notifications by keyword is a feature noticeably absent. Why can’t we get notification by deals on say PS3? This would be helpful if Dealighted offered this but they don’t. Instead they offer the ability to save deals you find. Many of these deals are time sensitive so this feature isn’t t very useful unless you want to look through and find deals to email your friends about. For yourself, why wouldn’t you just bookmark the deal page, why save it at Dealighted?
Another cool feature they could add would be the ability to make your own deal pages by keywords and then embed in other pages and blogs. How about sharing deals with friends on personal home pages, myspace, etc.? I found myself the more I looked at Dealighted hoping for features they didn’t have.
Site design, navigation and ad saturation level
The site design is clean, albeit a bit unspectacular. Color scheme of red, white, blue and light gray works. There is really only one ad strip along the right sidebar. As far as monetization I’m guessing many of the links are affiliate links and somewhere in the chain Dealighted is getting a piece, but I don’t know that for certain. I didn’t see any third party ad programs, ad banners or rotators. The page loading speed is excellent with the homepage an impressive less than 12k! This thing smokes even on a dial-up connection. It’s a page optimized for regular visits and refreshing which fits the apparent goals of the site.
Use the Search, Luke
As my wife remarked, the site search is pretty good. Here are two searches for items you might be trying to bag a good deal on this holiday season:
Dealighted PS3 search
Dealighted Wii search
Summary
Dealighted is a site with a good premise, ok execution from a shopper point of view if you are willing to keep visiting and refreshing the site looking for the deals you are interested in. Unfortunately, it comes up short in providing some really killer useful deal notification features. It is marked as beta in the logo so maybe that means they are going to take feedback from reviews like this one and come out with a version that includes features like RSS/email by keyword deal notification, automatic removal of deals that have expired (might be tricky to provide automated, but somebody could keep the list clean manually) and direct to deal click.
I don’t see much point in visiting the forums — from the shopper point of view — to see what someone says about the deal when clicking over to the deal saves the shopper a step and explains everything the shopper needs to know (in most cases). It does generate additional ad impressions and possibly generate some additional forum activity but that seems more helpful to the Dealighted folks than shoppers. I think this might have been part of what turned off my wife. She likes shopping at sites like Amazon and if a third party site can provide something to enhance her experience and save her time then she would probably use it. As it stands for this review Dealighted doesn’t really deliver unless she keeps returning and refreshes the page looking through the most recent aggregated posts or using the search for the deals she wants.
I can see why Dealighted launched early being that this is the biggest shopping time of the year, but the current site version at the time of this review (the day before Thanksgiving 2006) feels rushed and incomplete. At least they could have teased bargain hunters by promising some of the features which would make good sense like targeted deal notification but I didn’t see any “coming soon” features listed. If somebody reading sees a coming soon page or a link off the site that leads to explanation about what is coming when this leaves beta, please let me know in the comments below.
If you are a frequent online shopper and bargain hunter Dealighted is worth a look, perhaps even a bookmark for finding some deals, but the lack of features to help you target what you are really looking for beyond conducting manual searches (with manual refreshes — or using a third party program to refresh the page for you) is disappointing. Without adding some/most/all the features I mentioned and if we don’t win the Plasma TV of course, I doubt I’ll be back. Grade: D+
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I’m one of the developers for Dealighted.com. I wanted to respond to your comments/suggestions/critiques.
First, there are several features in the works that will alleviate many of your concerns:
1) A “slam” button adjacent to each deal, to let users report deals as duplicate or expired.
2) Search based email alerts of new deals that match a keyword.
3) An AJAX autorefresh, where you just sit and look at the homepage as new deals magically appear without refreshing.
I think that your review is confusing a key point about the site. Dealighted sifts through all user posted deal discussions to 3rd party forums like forums.slickdeals.net and fatwallet.com/forums, and when it sees a deal discussion that people really like (based on replies to the discussion thread, views, thread ratings), it “promotes” that discussion thread to the top of the dealighted.com homepage. Dealighted is not an editorial deal article aggregator. It doesn’t aggregate deals that an editor posted to the homepage of dealnews.com, for instance. The site only looks at deals that individuals posted to discussion forums, and then it shows you only the most popular ones.
No other aggregator does this. Aggregators, by definition, aggregate. They combine a bunch of junk and barf it out for you to have to sift through. Dealighted does not simply aggregate, its algorithm considers 1,000 deal threads each day, for instance, and only shows you the most popular 200. What’s more, it is able to identify a hot deal within 1-2 hours of the deal being posted to a forum. It is often difficult for a human to determine which deals are hot, just by browsing a forum, until the deal thread has already received tons of user replies and has gone cold.
The site links to 3rd party forum threads instead of directly to retailers because 1) that’s what dealighted is, a 3rd party discussion thread aggregator and 2) it’s usually necessary to visit the discussion thread and read what people are doing in order to get the deal (stacking coupons or other necessary instruction, coupon codes, etc).
For now, the site is a basic tool that is designed to help you get in on today’s best deals without having to visit 4 sites and comb through forums trying to figure out which deals are good. As it evolves, it will become more of a robust collection of the features that you mentioned in your review.
Comment by Scott — November 23, 2006 @ 1:01 am PST
Scott - Thanks for the long, detailed reply. I hope you don’t take my comments that follow personally because they aren’t meant that way. I understand that criticism can sometimes be a bitter pill to swallow especially when it is something you’ve poured your guts into, but hopefully armed with the information I’ve provided above and below you will be able to make your service even better. If you keep that spirit in this review and the discussion in mind then it can be productive.
You wrote: “I think that your review is confusing a key point about the site.”
What key point? That it should be harder — provide an extra step — for shoppers to get to deals? Let’s be clear here: the content for the shopper is the deal, not the forum post talking about the deal. Why would someone who is shopping for a computer want to go to a forum and read people joking around about some mispriced $49,000 computer? If I’m looking to buy say a PS3, I want to get directly to that deal as quickly as possible. One could argue that by the time an hour has passed it is way too late to actually take advantage of the deal.
EXAMPLE.
Tomorrow Amazon is going to have a deal for 1,000 Xbox 360 for $100. How fast do you think those will sell out? I bet much, much faster than one hour. Your program, if it evens aggregates that deal, will be too late.
“No other aggregator does this.”
I haven’t seen any other aggregator do exactly what you are doing, no, but there are a number of programs that will splice information from multiple sites/forums.
Let me explain.
I noticed some of those forums kicked out RSS feeds. It would not be difficult to whip up a script to slurp down the RSS feeds analyze against the views or thread replies (that’s likely how your program is analyzing “popularity”) and then generate a list. It would also be trivial to parse the inital post and post the links to the deal directly. I’m a programmer so I know how to do this and could write the code to do this, so check out my credentials before firing back a reply that challenges the technical merits of such a project.
“Dealighted is not an editorial deal article aggregator. It doesn’t aggregate deals that an editor posted to the homepage of dealnews.com, for instance.”
I understand that it’s an algorithm.
I spent a considerable amount of time at your site and fully understand what you are doing and trying to do. I also believe — and please correct me if I’m wrong — that the target audience for this type of site is online shoppers looking for bargains, yes/no?
I understand you are aggregating the forums (I even mentioned these forums by domain in the first paragraph of the review). You are trying to cut through the chaff and provide the wheat inside the deal forums, however, upon both myself and my wife’s opinion your algorithm isn’t doing a complete job at what we saw. Maybe over the course of weeks of reviewing the deals and having to manually search through the deals we are interested in, we’d have a more positive experience.
I gave specific examples of cases where the information just wasn’t useful to shoppers. If these were isolated cases, so be it, but they seemed representative to me of the problem that any machine is going to have solving the “useful” problem. Of course it’s very, very difficult for any algorithm to do a good job at that which is why I specifically said: might be tricky to provide automated, but somebody could keep the list clean manually.
I think no matter how good your algo is you are still going to need a human being in the process to prevent errata like the $49,000 computer and PS3 “tip” from slipping into the list.
“Dealighted does not simply aggregate, its algorithm considers 1,000 deal threads each day, for instance, and only shows you the most popular 200.”
Great, but then why does the shopper — remember, that’s your target audience, yes? — need to sift through those 200 “most popular” deals only to find a portion of them aren’t even deals (the PS3 “tip” as mentioned in the review) or the links are bad (outdated or inaccurate as the screenshot shows — nearly $50,000 for a computer? Come on). People like my wife who spend thousands of dollars online aren’t going to want to waste their time with an extra step at a site like yours.
Make it easy for the shopper to go directly to the deal, and give them features like RSS to integrate with their blogs, news articles, search terms, etc. I understand why you link to the forums, that’s attribution, but that isn’t the actual content, capiche? Aggregate the best and then provide the forum link too for the extra detail from somebody to boast about how they found the best deal, but give the link directly to the deal too because that’s the content the shopper is truly looking for. The forum stuff is great if they want to chime in and participate in the community but that’s not ultimately what the shopper is looking for.
Or are you saying that you are just using this program to look for people post deals on forums and not buy anything? I doubt that. Therefore, make it easy to do that: buy stuff. Don’t make it harder. Don’t put up more hoops to jump through. That’s the point, mon
“As it evolves, it will become more of a robust collection of the features that you mentioned in your review.”
I reviewed it looking for something people who shop online would want to use. Sorry that it didn’t make the cut. Please feel free to contact me again when these features have been added.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving and good luck with your product in the future.
Comment by TDavid — November 23, 2006 @ 2:14 am PST
Good luck with your site and service, not product
It’s late, lol. You get what I meant, I’m sure.
Comment by TDavid — November 23, 2006 @ 2:15 am PST
I sent you an email before I saw your reply here, but I’ll address some points you’ve raised.
“Make it easy for the shopper to go directly to the deal, and give them features like RSS to integrate with their blogs, news articles, search terms, etc. I understand why you link to the forums, that’s attribution, but that isn’t the actual content, capiche? Aggregate the best and then provide the forum link too for the extra detail from somebody to boast about how they found the best deal, but give the link directly to the deal too because that’s the content the shopper is truly looking for.”
That’s just not correct. The forum post, where we’re linking, IS the content. It is a deal posted by a user, usually concocted from a combination of techniques that must be applied in order to get the deal. The deal post is your instruction manual necessary to get the deal, in many cases. What’s more, the forum discussion itself gives you a quick summary of other people’s experiences with that deal. Whether or not the merchant honored the price, whether or not they were actually able to order at that price, etc. The deal thread is essential.
By “link directly to the deal”, I assume you mean “link directly to the retailer”. Again, it takes the deal out of context to just dump the person at the retailer without any background on what they’re looking for, what coupon codes to apply etc. Additionally, it would be bypassing the forum site, the original source of the deal, and taking their content and revenue.
“I noticed some of those forums kicked out RSS feeds. It would not be difficult to whip up a script to slurp down the RSS feeds”
Some forums provide feeds, some do not. Some feeds do not provide enough information for a thorough analysis. Thus, our site uses a combination of RSS feeds and spiders, which parses the HTML and pulls the necessary thread data into our database for analysis. A bit more involved than an RSS/XML parser, which is probably why our model isn’t used widely by John Q. Coder.
“why does the shopper — remember, that’s your target audience, yes? — need to sift through those 200 “most popular” deals only to find a portion of them aren’t even deals”
We’re pulling threads from hot deal discussion forums, so some of what we identify will be discussions rather than true product deals. When we add the “slam” button, people will be able to squelch those if they suck, but then again they might contain useful shopping/bargain hunting info.
“Tomorrow Amazon is going to have a deal for 1,000 Xbox 360 for $100. How fast do you think those will sell out? ”
I’m sure that could happen but it’s not a typical scenario. Most deals have a lifespan of at least a few hours. Additionally though, we do offer other features besides the main tab that could help with that sort of scenario. The “All: Forum style” tab acts like a traditional forum, but it’s a merge of many forums into one for easy viewing. When a thread gets a reply, it appears at the top of that list, and thread ratings (when available) are shown as green or red bars of varying lengths:
http://www.dealighted.com/forum
In any case, these features will be available sooner than later:
-Auto ajax refreshing
-Keyword search email alerts
-”Slam” button for users to report bum deals and expired deals
-Some manual moderating to remove bad deals that shouldn’t have been identified as hot in the first place
Comment by Scott — November 23, 2006 @ 3:29 am PST
Scott - I figured you’d be off cooking a turkey by now or sawing logs? That’s dedication on a holiday evening. I don’t show receiving any email from you, so you might want to check what address you sent to — should be hmm at tdscripts dot com. I’m not sure what else there was to email me at but you are of course welcome to email me or hit me up on Skype (TDavid). I won’t be around that much tomorrow though and I hope you won’t be either
Now to try explaining the forum thing one more (last?) time.
I’m not suggesting the forums are completely useless
It seems like you want to debate whether or not I understand what the forums are there for and how important they are to the overall process. If that’s where you are driving, I’m already there. Please, can we get past that and move to what I’m actually trying to point out here?
The way Dealighted currently works (as two of us saw anyway — please correct any errors), the shopper has to go through the forums every time to find the link to the actual deal. In every example I’ve given both here and in the review the forum was an unnecessary step in this process. Please look back at the specific, detailed examples I provided above.
Do you see what I’m saying?
I asked above who your user/customer/surfer was and you either missed or ignored answering my question. Is it primarily someone looking to buy something or kick tires chatting things up in the deal forum with the person who shared the deal? If it is the former, shouldn’t these folks desire the smallest number of steps, the least amount of time absorbed and easy, concise information to follow? Not giving them a link to scroll through a forum and try and figure out if a deal is some joke, a dead or duplicate link, or just a needless extra step (as was the case in the deals we looked through, but I concede that will not be the case every time)?
I realize you are coming out later with tools and I addressed that specifically in the review. I’d recommend getting a page up on your site somewhere obvious that explains that these features will be coming and if possible when (or approximately when). The reality is that nobody that visits/uses your site and isn’t already familiar with the deal forums (or a reader of this review and comments) won’t know any of this information. What are people supposed to think using the site here and now? They will judge based on what’s there as we have, not on what they hope/think/wonder might be there in the future. Tell us what good stuff is coming, tease us, keep us interested.
I’m not suggesting axing the forum links, rather that you could add a link to the deal(s) in your summary on the Dealighted aggregator listing, not only the forum page. You could scrape the thread starter posts and provide the links to the deal at the retailer directly. These links all open in new windows so if they need to look back and still visit the forum for details they can do so. If you aren’t interested in doing that, fine, it is just a suggestion.
The person is shopping though, right? I’ll ask again: that is the goal here, right? If that is the case and Dealighted isn’t doing everything it can to help people find great deals — including removing or reducing redundant or unnecessary steps — why use at all?
I will say it again: Dealighted has a good premise. For those who are posting whores in the deals forums this might be the greatest thing since sliced turkey, but for people who do lots of shopping online, the turkey needs more cooking time.
I’m curious what other readers will have to say about your service, if anything. They might totally disagree with me and agree these forums should be the only link as you have it now. Or they might think your service is sort of an unnecessary proxy. Or they might not give a hoot either way. Hard to predict.
Good luck with your service. I do mean that sincerely. As well as to having a nice holiday. Whew, 2:25, time to eject for the night.
Comment by TDavid — November 23, 2006 @ 5:24 am PST
[…] TDavid links to a pretty useful site for aggregating all the various deals sites, Dealighted.com. Posted: November 23, 2006 by Nathan Weinberg in: […]
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