ugenie - automate your best price+coupon search
By Vivek Puri | October 30th, 2006 at 07:44 am ET
ugenie is among one of the very few ideas which plan to make it easy the way we shop. ugenie has recognized the fact that most of the shoppers think it is not worth going to 5 different stores in order to save $1 using a coupon on a $20 product. You can end up burning more gas and miles on your car and in the end you are not even guaranteed of any savings. So how does ugenie solve the problem?
Every time your search for a product at ugenie, it’s intelligent system searches on thousands on web sites instantaneously to come up with the lowest prices. This lowest price includes the shipping, taxes, and any coupons available for the product on that particular site. You might ask — Do they really search for coupons? Yup that is the problem they are looking to solve- unlock the hidden savings. Lot of the consumers never use coupons since the amount of savings is not justified by the amount of research, and effort required to save few bucks. ugenie automates this task for you. It will dig the Internet for all the available coupons for a particular product and automatically verify and apply those to the item to come up with the best price. So no more wasting hours on Fatwallet.com or Slickdeals.net to get a $5 coupon and find out later that someone has already used it.
ugenie doesn’t stop here. Consider the case when you want to buy 2 or more items. If you shop for these items individually you might not get the best deal especially in terms of shipping or in case of coupons applicable for multiple item purchase. When you search for this combination on ugenie, it’s system will search millions of possible permutations and combinations to find the cheapest combination of products and merchants. This price will take into account the discounts, coupons, shipping, and taxes available for that combination of products. ugenie calls this search- “true price discovery”, which is so rightly said. Also, when you search for items at ugenie, you can filter items by their condition, shipping times, merchants, merchant rating, and promotions, to come up with results that suit you best.
Besides the consumers, ugenie is great for merchants too. Merchants themselves have never been able to get the ROI on their flyer’s and coupons they send out to consumers. ugenie system will automatically bring up the best merchant listings onto the top while reducing advertising cost and increasing customer base for the biggest discounters.
The part I feel the best about ugenie is that it will monetize its operations only through transactions. ugenie doesn’t have any plans for sponsored listing right now, which usually trick consumers to get into a deal which might not be the best for them. So when you view any listing on the top of the search results at ugenie, you can be sure that it is the best deal available in the market at that time.
ugenie is currently in the alpha stage, and working aggressively on building its search and crawling capabilities, while establishing partnerships with some of the biggest merchants. ugenie, located in Palo Alto, CA, is lead by Krishna Motukuri who had co-founded Amazon India. ugenie management also includes Harish Abbott(Founder & President) and Bharat Vijay(CTO). ugenie had received $5 million funding from BlueRun Ventures and Sierra Ventures in June 2006.
So, while ugenie’s genie is at work we can really save few buck this time around!!
Links:
ugenie
Tags: StartupSquad - Web20 - Shopping - Search
on November 1st, 2006 at 12:59 pm
[…] http://startupsquad.com/2006/10/30/ugenie-automate-your-best-pricecoupon-search/ […]
on January 17th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
[…] Couple of players that have similar features to Booksprice are- myTriggers that gives persistent search results and uGenie that gives your the best price for multiple items in your cart. […]
on February 8th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
I can’t beleive this site got $5 million in venture cap, the general price comparison shopping market is allready dominated by several giants and as far as books go- there are several sites that just plain easier to use and do the same thing, mayb e even better…… I would recoment checking out Textbook411.com for textbooks and maybe bookfinder for regular and hard to find books. I am sure the experience and track record of these guys came into play, but still, I am shocked they got that much cash!
on February 8th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
uGenie is not just a comparison shopping site. They automatically finds and applies coupons to your shopping cart. In other words, for most purposes there is no need to spend hours on Fatwallet for marginal gains unless you are a ebay powerseller. The site also works great if you want to buy multiple items at the same time.
on April 6th, 2007 at 1:36 am
[…] All the feature upgrades are great, but I am not sure what really is going on with the much touted coupon discovery feature at uGenie? If you remember, uGenie was supposed to crawl or syndicate coupon feeds and automatically apply them to your cart. Well only problem is that I don’t see that happening very often on the site. Even if coupons are being applied there is practically no way to find which are the best deals going on. Krishna/Harish@uGenie any updates on that? […]
on April 18th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
[…] Comparing the new launch to existing biggies like Fatwallet.com or SlickDeals.net(somehow the traffic curve on Alexa for both these sites is sharply down as compared to last year. Not sure what is killing the deal out there), CouponLooker clearly has the social component missing on the site that had given those sites a very sticky experience. If you spend some time on these sites, you would observe that people get the best deals by combining offers and stuff for really cheap prices and than share this information with other users in the community. If you haven’t tried till now, you will be amazed at how fast deal discussions progress at these sites. This kind of collaboration is not really possible on site which is purely search based and presents coupons in an automated manner. In the longer run you won’t really love the community effect at these deal sites after a while ’cause the returns you get as compared to the time invested is abysmally low. Maybe - $5/hour of time spent on the higher side. Not worth the effort. This just the reason I was excited about uGenie’s launch that plans to automate the coupon search and apply process sometime this year. Coming back to CouponLooker/Judy’s Book, the new launch doesn’t do either of these things. In my opinion guys at Judy’s Book really needs to understand and solve the ROI problem on the consumer side. Just being able to search for coupons won’t get me to use the site. […]
on May 7th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
By the time the CEO and CTO understands the deal/coupon market, $5 M will be gone. If something like this has to happen (which i believe is extremely difficult), then it has to come from someone already in the market. someone like slickdeals or fatwallet . Its difficult to 100% automate the deal/coupon process. To get the accurate price, manual intervention is required or it has to be user generated, like in forums. I would like to see how they solve the problem that priceGrabber and shopping.com (EBAY) cannot solve.
on May 30th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
[…] Recently Buxfer quietly launched amazing set of features that I don’t think have been offered by any startup till date. The most significant of them is Deal recommendations. Buxfer platform now goes beyond just tracking money to actually helping users save money. Based on how users spend money, Buxfer recommends deals which can help them save on future purchases. I think a platform enhancement like this is easier said than done ’cause Buxfer is crawling the web for deal information and then ranking those deals based on their relevance to user transactions and popularity among other Buxfer users. Most of the apps out there just to one of the 2 things - deal tracking or finance tracker. Delivering a combination is a nice move from Buxfer. uGenie is the only other startup in recent history that has a serious enough plan around coupons. […]
on June 8th, 2007 at 10:10 am
[…] ugenie.com is back to the list after a positive month, maybe their idea about integrating coupons into search results finally start to pay off? The biggest gain this month comes from pronto.com, up 21.78%. The worst results come from activeshopper.com (-26.21%) and mysimon.com (-25.78%). Enjoy the rest of the results below. […]
on June 11th, 2007 at 11:22 am
[…] ugenie.com is back to the list after a positive month, maybe their idea about integrating coupons into search results finally starts to pay off? The biggest gain this month comes from pronto.com, up 21.78%. The worst results come from activeshopper.com (-26.21%) and mysimon.com (-25.78%). Enjoy the rest of the results below. […]
on June 15th, 2007 at 5:54 am
[…] losercrew.com: Popular price comparison sites - May 2007 […]
on June 27th, 2007 at 10:01 am
Check out:
http://www.searchmydeal.com/
This tool is indispensable if you frequently use slickdeals or fatwallet.
on October 19th, 2007 at 1:37 am
http://www.elivedeals.com os one of the best website to find deals,coupons,rebates,bargains and discounts. Frequently updated deals.
on October 19th, 2007 at 1:39 am
http://www.elivedeals.com os one of the best website to find deals,coupons,rebates,bargains and discounts. Frequently updated deals;
on November 20th, 2007 at 6:45 pm
Using a price comparison search engine is the way to go. I used one in college and it saved me tons on my books. I went from spending around $500 a semester to about $150. The one I am currently using is SmartBookFinder.com, http://www.smartbookfinder.com. They have comparison services for buying books, selling books, and renting books.
on February 17th, 2008 at 1:45 am
No Spamming Saurbh Mehta of your sastasauda.com
You are the notorious spammer who needs to stop SPAMMING ?
Does your employer VERIZON knows that you runing this site and illigally spamming the web with it ?
Do you know on H1B VISA you cant start the business ? Also spamming is not allowed for any one ?
STOP SPAMMING
on April 3rd, 2008 at 8:41 pm
http://www.Dealitem.com is latest deal site for most of the stuff. It works best when you’re searching for something by model # or by make and features. If you know what you’re looking for, check out DealItem. Search over 175,000 deals and coupons from most popular sites. Find latest deals and coupons updated every few minutes. Search best bargain and branded shopping websites to find all the deals and coupons indexed by Dealitem.com. Dealitem brings search not only from popular sites but also from best shopping sites so you get all the results with one click. You can also set an alert and you will receive email whenever that item is listed as deal on any one of the popular deal sites.