Priceonomics’ price comparison
Priceonomics launched in December of 2011 after a seed round of funding through Y-Combinator, and this Mountain View, California based company has a chance to use modern web culture to undercut the Kelly Blue Book legacy empire by crowdsourcing and combing the web for the current values of products, taking out the element of surprise and hours of research to determine the street values of products from televisions to iPads to boats and even strollers.
Priceonomics said, “Price guides are helpful for buying and selling used things. How much should I spend on this used bicycle on Craigslist? What’s a good price to list my stereo system for on eBay? Is this used Vespa a good deal, or what? We hate getting ripped off or over-paying for stuff so we built Priceonomics. We search and analyze hundreds of millions of listings on the web to build our price guides. We hope you can use these reports to get the most value for the best price.”
Other products will soon be added to the extensive lineup, and it would be interesting to see more listing sources added to the lineup like Etsy. One of the features that is helpful for shoppers is the “I want this at a good price” feature where users can receive an email when the product of the shopper’s choice comes up at a good price on any of the sites the service scans, like eBay or Amazon.
Businesses, pay attention
Priceonomics is helpful for any professional looking to save money and find the best retail deals, saving money on electronics for the office or even chairs and desks. It makes sense to know the going rate according to a generated estimate and makes even more sense to get price alerts.
What companies may not pay attention to, however, because the company is so young, is that as it adds products (and maybe services someday?) to the lineup, industries that did not appear at first may suddenly be thrown into the mix which should most certainly be monitored. Any company offering a product should watch so they know what consumers are expecting to pay, even if it is inaccurate or based on resale item prices. It helps with consumer confusion when someone calls and says “but the internet told me I only had to pay $50 for this $600 kayak.”
