At one point, I stopped reading most of the email newsletters that came into the separate inbox I set up specifically for the purpose of keeping such emails out of my main inbox. Not too long after that, I completely swore off daily deals (too many customer service problems and things I thought I’d want to use, but somehow, never really ended up needing). Trouble is, I know those deals are out there, and it often kills me to pay full-price for something. Just knowing the deal exists somewhere for someone else smarts: if I’d only been more diligent about combing my inbox, saving promo codes, remembering sales…maybe I’d be paying less and feeling like less of a full-retail-price chump in the process.
I’m hardly the only person who has this problem. Proof comes in the handful of new companies launching to solve it. I recently covered several of them for FastCompany. One was San Francisco-based Hipiti, which officially launched out of its beta phase this week. Sign up using your Facebook or Twitter account, and you’ll have access to a personalized dashboard of deals and promotions drawn from the marketing messages of over 150 retailers and two years’ worth of data.
Even better, the site’s tech is set up to alert you to deals that are especially noteworthy. Along with rating offers based on a four-tiered system, if a retailer usually discounts items around 10 or 20 percent, and they happen to launch a 30 percent off sale, Hipiti is likely to highlight the offer and make sure you know it’s one worth checking out (see the pink box on the left above).
I also like Hipiti’s grassroots authenticity. There are a lot of companies that come from serial entrepreneurs and tech insiders and incubators and blah, blah, blah that seem to be trying to spin the next moneymaker out of thin air. And while it’s true that Hipiti founders Kristin Flink Kranias and Rama Katkar hail from Stanford Business School, and the technology was created by Reputation.com co-founder and CTO Brian Kelley, the company has come together slowly over the last two years, is self-funded and, based on my conversations with Kranias, seems really focused on creating a good user experience that takes into account what shoppers these days are really looking for.
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