DailyTech - Dynamite Deals Plugin Available for Firefox, Chrome

Submit News

Blog: Internet Dynamite Deals Plugin Available for Firefox, Chrome
Brandon Hill (Blog) - October 6, 2010 2:20 AM

10 comment(s) - last by kingius.. on Oct 12 at 7:04 AM

Dynamite Deals plugin in action (Google Chrome). Clicking on the little dynamite icon in the address bar will bring you up a listing of the three lowest priced merchants on the web.

Dynamite Deals plugin gives you the lowest pricing on products in realtime

When looking for the lowest prices on tech on the web, many folks may go to a price engine beforehand to scope out the best prices on products. However Dynamite Deals is promoting its new browser plugin which allows you to skip a few steps in the price comparison process.

After viewing a product on just about any merchant's website, the Dynamite Deals plugin will alert you to whether the price listed is the best available on the web. If the merchant you're visiting doesn't have the lowest price, you can click the plugin's icon to see a listing of the top three lowest priced merchants on the web with requisite links to those merchants. The plugin is unobtrusive and only springs into action if the browser lands on a product page that is tracked by Dynamite Deals.

There are currently over 85 million products pages (and counting) tracked in the database and pricing is updated in real-time every day.

The Dynamite Deals plugin is currently available for both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

Comments

Threshold

Username
Password
remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

RE: Sounds interesting, but...

By tastyratz on 10/6/2010 10:22:56 AM , Rating: 2

because that's how the program functions. Opting out is like downloading a torrent without uploading, and notice the words "suppoted merchant's site". That means it is not sending them everything you do, only your shopping choices.

If you care about search services seeing you shopping choices then a shopping search service plugin isn't for you is it?

You computer:
I found this vibrator for $12 on amazon, is this a good deal?

dynamite server:
oh good it was last listed as 14 on amazon. other shoppers have seen this at buy.com for $11.

your computer: click here to buy for $11 on buy.com

While this could work by having you hammer a thousand retailers from your computer every time you look at something while shopping, it could result in a slow experience waiting for pricing information.
By centralizing a database as the primary point you reduce redundant hammering (pissing off participating retailers) and you wont slow to a crawl waiting on the slowest retailer website to contact your pc.

Parent

RE: Sounds interesting, but...

By bug77 on 10/6/2010 11:38:50 AM , Rating: 2

I understand that's how it works, but why? Why does it need to store stuff I visit? Why does it need me to download pages in order for them to keep their database up to date?

Needless to say, I didn't install it in the end.

Parent

RE: Sounds interesting, but...

By tastyratz on 10/6/2010 2:38:20 PM , Rating: 2

Because its a free plugin and that's how you keep overhead down. Say store A has 10,000 products offered for sale. 90% of their sales might be their top 500 products. They could poll the store 10,000 times a day to get the price but then your using massively more bandwidth, and your limited to 1 pricing update per day. What if the price was just updated? it wouldn't reflect in the comparison. What if nobody looked at any of the other 9,500 product prices that day? then it doesn't matter to you the consumer.

Could you rely on participating vendors to upload changes? sure. Would you want to depend on that and trust they are keeping up? probably not.

Like torrents - the more popular products updated via people with the plugin the better the plugin would work for everyone.

Here is a quote right from them
Why do they do it?

quote:
As part of this process, Dynamite Data's servers will periodically ask your extension for the full HTML of random product pages so that we can parse it and update our records. This allows us to cut down on the number of pages our robot has to crawl, saving computing time for the merchant.

That's the answer from the source. Overhead costs work against the free concept.

Parent

RE: Sounds interesting, but...

By bug77 on 10/7/2010 4:30:51 AM , Rating: 2

Yeah, well, call me weird, but I care more about stuff going out of my computer than I care for "computing time for the merchant".
Then again, Google may be doing the same thing with their product search.

Parent

RE: Sounds interesting, but...

By dynamitezach on 10/7/2010 11:49:05 AM , Rating: 2

Long story short, we're able to provide this service for free to users because we also run www.dynamitedata.com, which has a fee-based B2B tool for manufacturers and online merchants. When users of Dynamite Deals browse sites, it helps improve the quality of the data we provide to both our users and these businesses.

We figure everyone wins, but we also give users the option to turn it off if you'd prefer.

In general, we take user privacy very seriously, here's an excerpt from our Privacy Policy:

quote:
Dynamite Data Browser Add-ons: Dynamite Data's comparison shopping service only functions when the user is detected to be at a supported merchant's website. On a supported merchant's website, all visited URLs are searched against Dynamite Data's database of products. If the submitted URL matches with a product that Dynamite Data tracks, search results are transmitted back to the user and displayed in their browser.

The Dynamite Data browser add-ons also gathers two additional types of data under extremely limited circumstances, both of which can be opted out of via the add-on's Feedback/Options window: a background web page downloader that retrieves merchants' product pages on Dynamite Data's behalf, and a troubleshooting log (which contains basic information on user preferences, the search results of recently viewed products, and internal parameters) that is optionally transmitted with user feedback from the Feedback/Options window. Both of these data sources are scrubbed of personally-identifiable information -- including URLs visited and cookies -- before being transmitted to Dynamite Data's servers.

Parent

RE: Sounds interesting, but...

By kingius on 10/12/2010 7:03:14 AM , Rating: 2

Why not just run a query against the API's of the various companies (e.g. Amazon, eBay) as and when required, instead of downloading tons of redudant data that isn't currently being requested? It strikes me that there is something else you are providing in the B2B end of the deal that you can monetise.

Parent