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!!
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Tags: StartupSquad - Web20 - Shopping - Search
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