Having to enter a credit card to start the trial is a massive turn off. Especially at this stage of the product. This will turn of a lot of people from providing any meaningful feedback from HN community.
Kudos to you guys for building this. There is always a lot of scepticism from people on "why would anyone pay for this" . Reality is not everyone has the time or resources to build their own kit. There are literally 1000s of businesses on the internet that that are in the business of selling "time" or timesavers and removing the risk of maintenance, ongoing support.
Keep improving this and with the rise of web personalization, the demand will continue to grow.
I'm the founder of http://pricify.com and we've had several iterations of the product and focusing on various experiments. Currently we land users on a landing page and thats a test we've been running for a while, but we've also had it where products are listed upfront with infinite scroll. Both seem to achieve hit different goals.
We've spent a long time establishing landing page messages so it makes sense to users as soon as they get there - otherwise they just bounce, including HN users! I've not signed up to try this out, but there is just not enough info before asking a visitor to sign up. So may want to add some info there on the value prop?
Interestingly, my co-founder and I always still fell into the trap of purchasing something on the net and within a few days seeing the product for a whole bunch less. About a year ago, we set about building a tool that would "monitor/watch" the prices on our behalf and we wanted it to work on any shopping site.
A few month ago, we launched Pricify http://pricify.com and this is our first iteration. Basically, you can use a simple bookmarklet to add products to pricify from any online store, once the product drops in price the system sends you an email or facebook notification, if at any point the product hits it all time lowest price it sends you a separate email as well.
Last week we had a guy who bought a car as a result of the price drop he noticed and contact us to thank us. This has provided us further confidence of its use.
We've learnt so much already and are adding what our users are asking for. Ultimately, we want to build something that solved a problem for us in the hope that it solves the problem for others, so far we have been seeing promising results.
We want to get into the content, blogging from a SEO perspective, but we've had very limited bandwidth trying to focus on the main functionality itself being completely bootstrapped!
Early days, but would love any advice on whats already being learnt from the others out here.
We built this for clothes (http://www.shopofme.com) a while ago. It did some fashion specific stuff on top of it but in essence the same principal, alerts when items drop in price.
Might be interesting to chat as I'm still running the site as a side project these days after the primary business model didn't work out. We built a fair bit of pretty solid tech for it so might at least be some knowledge share there? Contact details in profile.
Just curious, how do you implement such a thing? I mean how do you avoid polling the stores zillions of times, which would probably eventually be shut off by the stores?
One thing I don't understand. Do merchants mind being "price-compared" like this, or not? If so, do they help with content like thumbnails, API for price data, stock availability, etc?
I remember some time ago octopart.com (similar tool) had problems with DigiKey (merchant) because it was merely redirecting to its products.
