Easy access to a wide range of online data sources makes comparison shopping pretty much default human behavior for today’s consumers. There are plenty of price comparison tools both online and in the form of mobile apps, so standing out takes some extra effort. That’s why Decide.com is teaming up with Shopzilla’s Bizrate to bring its buy/don’t buy recommendations to the comparison shopping tool.
Decide.com, as its name implies, is a tool to help buyers decide whether or not to make a purchase. It helps take some of the more complicated guesswork out of the hands of shoppers, using proprietary tech to not only search the web for prices, but also collect news and rumors from around the web about product releases to tell users whether it’s a good time to buy a particular item right now, or whether it might be better to wait since there’s likely a price drop or a new version just around the corner.
It’s something Mac fans might find familiar; MacRumors offers a similar service for Apple products specifically through its Buyer’s Guide, but Decide.com covers a much wider range of products. The site launched in June 2011, and also introduced iPhone and Android mobile apps, but now the partnership with Bizrate should help it bring its consumer awareness brand to an even larger audience, Decide.com VP of Product & Marketing Michael Paulson told BetaKit in an interview.
“We have predictive algorithms based on our 100 TB database, based on over eight billion price observations we can predict how pricing will change over the next couple of weeks with a high degree of accuracy,” Paulson said. “What we see is, we’re now giving shoppers a really useful signal that they need at the moment of purchase, and we’ve been doing that on our own site, and on our iPhone and Android apps, but there are millions of people on Bizrate.com who maybe aren’t aware that we have this free solution.”
Paulson said the company isn’t disclosing terms of the deal at his time, but the Bizrate integration displays a “Powered by Decide” label on the buy/wait recommendation section of a product page which links back to the site. “The way we’re doing this is, we’re thinking about it in terms of the very big picture,” Paulson explained. “We’re looking to create the next signal, we know we have something highly valuable to shoppers, and our goal is to make this broadly available to people wherever and whenever they’re shopping.”
The ultimate goal is to make Decide a name that shoppers turn to when they want to make an informed decision about shopping online, Paulson said, and in pursuit of that goal he noted it’s likely that additional future partnerships crop up between it and other online shopping tools, too. For now, though, Decide’s data-driven recommendations give Bizrate a leg up on competitors like PriceGrabber.com and even Amazon Price Check, so it could give Decide’s new partner plenty of incentive to try to keep the arrangement exclusive.
