Deals at Judy’s Book Launched

By Vivek Puri | September 29th, 2006 at 10:04 am ET         

Judy’s Book is moving aggressively to gain ground in the local business review and search. At the start of this month Judy’s Book added ‘Deals’ feature which will provide users with deals and coupons from the places they shop both online and in their neighborhood. The ‘Deals’ feature will contain current deals and discounts submitted by users as well as various brands.

Judy’s Book (JB), located in Seattle, WA, was launched in 2004 and is lead by Andy Sack. JB is a well funded company whose investors include Mobius Venture Capital, Ignition Partners, Ackerley Partners, and few angel investors.

JB team is putting in lot of effort to distinguish itself from other deal and review sites. JB deals can be created by the users who also have option to add photos and tags to the deal. JB deals can be voted and commented on by the users which will make sure only the best deals reach the top. JB team is also putting in lot of effort to keep the content fresh and clean. They have a team of deal editors who check for genuine and accurate deals. To find deals for a particular product, users can either search for deals or browse JB or use tags. Users can also subscribe to alerts to get updated on new deals. JB provides browser toolbars which show users the top deals available for any site they visit. Users can also post deals back to JB using the toolbar.

To attract and engage users, JB has setup profit sharing where it will provide commissions to the users who enhance a commissionable deal (a deal that Judy’s Book gets paid on). JB is also launching ‘Expert Shopper’ feature next Tuesday, which is supposed to make shopping easier for the customer. ‘Expert Shopper’ will be a platform where customers can seek help from fellow expert shoppers for finding the right item and for the right price. Besides this, JB has also setup partnership with Valpak recently to distribute their local coupons on judysbook.com.

Couple of issues I noticed includes no option to associate a zip code or state with a deal, which makes it hard to locate local coupons easily. Also as JB tries to offer user rated deals, it should have proper measures in place to prevent hijacking of site by few users or its editorial staff overreacting to certain user activities.

JB surely would have done its calculations but I am bit skeptical about maintaining deal editors team. They better outsource that task or use Amazon Mechanical Turk to lower their risk. I am pretty sure Google won’t do this way.

JB has done great work in identifying the right mix of features from digg, fatwallet (or other deal sites) and its expertise of local business search and reviews. By combining local business search with local/national deals JB can add real value to the site. This area is not without tough competition though and comes at a time when Google has announced that it will also be offering coupons when users search for businesses on Google Maps.

Links:
Deals at Judy’s Book
Judy’s Book

Tags: StartupSquad, Web2.0, Web_2.0, Deals, Coupons, Judysbook