Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

yahoo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 52 posts

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

#2

Post by TheBiv »

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"

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

#3

Post by toomuchtodo »

TheBiv wrote: 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 ;)

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

#5

Post by roymurdock »

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 for a price adjustment review on a recently placed purchase. Please reference: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/xxxx and xxx.

I ordered a Crucial 16GB Kit (8GBx2) DDR3L-1600 SODIMM Memory for Mac (CT2K8G3S160BM ) for $66.99 on January 10.

However this afternoon I noticed that the price is $0.50 less than the amount I was charged, as it decreased to $66.49. As I bought the item recently, and the price has been significantly discounted, would it be possible for you to please start processing a post-order price adjustment refund?

Many thanks for your outstanding customer service.

Best, Roy Murdock

The service also attaches a screenshot of the shipping confirmation to the email automatically, which is pretty cool.

I suspect that I would get more value from the service if I purchased a higher volume of commodity/low price goods on Amazon, especially computing parts that are essentially guaranteed to go down in price within the near future. Overall, it's great to have this sort of protection from dropped prices and is definitely worth the email access permissions in my opinion - but at the first sign of a data breach or privacy issue, I will drop the service immediately. I am not affiliated with Paribus in any way.

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

#6

Post by mmanfrin »

I was using this for a couple months and it saved me a bit of money, but in the end I couldn't get over the idea of a third party having total access to my email account -- which is total access to every account I own (banks, social media, everything). It just weirds me out. I canceled the service and changed my email password.

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

#7

Post by MichaelBurge »

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 form of customer service. It just seems like greed more than any real value.

Now, those old scummy companies that used to offer rebates while employing actuaries to calculate percentage chance that you won't cash the rebate, intentionally make the process difficult, and then profit? Go ahead and run those guys into the ground. If someone could upload a scan of the rebate and have you guys do the rest, I wouldn't mind that.

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

#9

Post by ericglyman »

eachro wrote: 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)

Post reply on HN