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Paribus (YC S15) saves you money when items you purchased online drop in price

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31–40 of 52 posts

Re: Paribus (YC S15) saves you money when items you purchased online drop in price

#31
post #26

I've used Paribus, and although I'm not usually a fan of letting services connect to my email (even the one I use for shopping), I like it. I've received a few refunds from products that I have pre-ordered and then watched the price drop the day after it came out. Amazon has been happy to honor all these requests so far.

Create a completely new email account only for Amazon. Connect it to Paribus, and then forward it to your main email account. Your privacy concerns will be limited to whatever Paribus does with your Amazon purchase history.

Re: Paribus (YC S15) saves you money when items you purchased online drop in price

#33
post #2

Seemingly really cool service. I don't know if I want to authenticate my email address with them though. It seems to me like Amazon/Best Buy/etc next move will be to add a provision that "You must submit a claim not through an automated service"

> It seems to me like Amazon/Best Buy/etc next move will be to add a provision that "You must submit a claim not through an automated service" So their service will auth against your Gmail account in order to place a Draft there for you to send ;)

although if you're giving the service free reign of your email, it could easily look for those confirmation emails.

Re: Paribus (YC S15) saves you money when items you purchased online drop in price

#36
post #8

Does Paribus get anything out of this besides data? Do company's buy Paribus's data?

Founder here. We are not selling data. Our model is to charge a portion of refunds that we actually get for you (that way we share same incentive as our users)

    > We are not selling data
Yet. Do you offer an iron-clad guarantee you won't in the future? Otherwise it seems like the first thing you'll do if investors start to put pressure on you...

Re: Paribus (YC S15) saves you money when items you purchased online drop in price

#37
This thing needs a fucking threshold mechanic. I just signed up and it sent 3 refund requests all for around 50 cents. That's just embarrassing. I contemplated cancelling my account before I realized the damage (the emails) had already been done. If it does this again before a threshold mechanic is implemented, I'll be definitely closing my account.

Re: Paribus (YC S15) saves you money when items you purchased online drop in price

#38

If a kid screams in the restaurant and they have a policy of giving him a free lollipop to calm him down, that doesn't mean we need an app to keep track of the restaurants you've visited without claiming your free lollipop and then hire a company to go around with an automated screaming device to coax dozens of lollipops out of the local businesses. This seems like the kind of company that would spoil this particular…

Is it like a kid screaming and paying people to shake down restaurants? Not really. The essence of the problem solved is information asymmetry. To see this, break the app into two apps -- one that simply informs you that you missed out on a deal and makes you feel bad, and one that compensates you and makes you feel better by giving you a savings.

This is a side-payment, as in Coase's theorem. You are outraged at the side-payment, but that just hides the information asymmetry under a cloak of disgust. There is no valid reason that the purchaser should not learn the price subsequently dropped -- but the nature of homo economicus being what it is no one will use the first app without the second.

This app is an application of Coase's theorem, and takes an externality (uninformed consumers are like a clean river to dump bad pricing into at a profit) and internalizes that cost by making companies pay it -- it is always better for the market if costs are internalized, assuming markets work at all.

It doesn't matter whether the company or the consumer pays, according to Coase's theorem. The result will be the same. We might invent reasons to be outraged that the company pays, but really all that has happened is a market inefficiency -- information asymmetry -- has been eliminated. Prices are less sticky and more flexible. This is good.

Re: Paribus (YC S15) saves you money when items you purchased online drop in price

#40

One data point: I signed up for the service ~ 6 months ago. I do ~ $200 in Amazon purchases a month. I got my first rebate last night: 50 cents back on some RAM that had dropped in price the day after I purchased it. For anyone who is concerned about email permissions, here's the email (automatically sent from my personal account) to Amazon: Subject: I was charged more than current price Hey, I am writing you to ask…

I randomly got one for a Christmas present I ordered. Went down from almost $40 to $30. Good savings percentage-wise, and nice to see it happen in an automated fashion.

Though I did sign up like a year ago and this was the first time I had heard anything (totally forgot about it until now).

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