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Sounds like a good idea if competition from companies such as Square Trade can be overcome and visibility in a sea of merchant services can be gained. What I thought first when I saw the company name, "BuySafe", though, was that this is a startup offering a service that would take the fear of getting ripped off from the buying process. I'm in the process of moving into a new home and am busy buying a few new items. After finding the product I like, my main concern is whether or not I'm getting the right price. For all of the shopping comparison engines out there, I have yet to find an online service that can definitively tell me that. The challenge is particularly acute in the mattress market, where each retailer calls the same mattress a different name. For example, what Mattress Discounters calls the Carmel, a mom and pop shop next door to it might call the Quinlan. Same mattress, just $1000 price difference. So, the mattress retailers can sell anything and guarantee it is the lowest price because no other retailer offers a mattress that goes by that name. This pricing power allows the big mattress retailers to clog our radio waves with annoying advertisments and demonically catchy jingles. Quite a scam. One would think that with all the venture capital being invested and the number of beds around the world in need of mattresses, that some enterprising soul would figure out a better way to purchase a mattress. But typing that word into any leading search engine yields little help. What's needed is the ability to type the name of a product and your ZIP code into your mobile phone while standing in a retail shop and find out if you've got the best deal in front of you. Obviously, there are tons of challenges involved in offering that service, but I imagine many are working on it. Maybe, it will be ready by the next time I move. Technorati tags: always+on, alwayson, ao, shopping, buysafe.
Comments
From: John K,
I'm afraid the solution already exists - if only in the paid subscription format. Consumerreports.org covers this market and others fairly regularly. Here is an excerpt: The reason is that shoppers are flying blind. It's hard to tell one box of metal, foam, fuzz, and fabric from another, making you vulnerable to a sales pitch. Model names differ from store to store, making it impossible to comparison shop. And prices vary so much that the $1,300 mattress set you look at one day can cost $2,600 the next. We know; that happened to us. To explode mattress misconceptions and expose what many retailers don't want you to know, Consumer Reports shopped in all kinds of stores, interviewed mattress makers, and polled visitors to our Web site, ConsumerReports.org, about their buying experiences. We hired two retired industry insiders, with a combined 87 years of experience, to tear apart 18 beds from Sealy, Serta, Simmons, and Spring Air, the top-selling brands. Our objective: to point out differences among low- and high-priced models."
Posted on:
August 2, 2006 8:50 AM
From: Josh Jaffe,
Thanks for your comment, John. I clicked through to the link you provided and logged in to the Consumer Reports web site. I read the useful story from June 2006 at that link and an earlier one from February 2006. I did not find a rating of individual mattresses. I also found no mobile phone capability nor a local search function that would take into account a consumer's specific location. I then conducted a site search using the term "Simmons" and the two best results were the previously mentioned stories that focus more on how best to buy a mattress rather than individual reviews. If I missed something on the site, please let me know. Don't get me wrong, I dig Consumer Reports. It's great, but it doesn't come close to solving the problem I wrote about above. Matteo, thanks for chiming in. I visited the NearbyNow site and couldn't find a service available to consumers. It seems to only be serving merchants and mall owners.
Posted on:
August 2, 2006 11:41 PM
From: Burton,
I clicked through the NearbyNow link and it has the service up and running. It looks like it allows you to peruse all of the inventory of every store in a mall from the Internet or a cell phone. Prices are there, so it's getting closer to what you're looking for. Try this link on the mall site.
Posted on:
August 23, 2006 8:28 PM
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What you are looking for may be already here. Your post reminded me of a conversation I recently had with a member of the founding team at Nearbynow: http://www.nearbynow.com