The Price Crusher CrushMyPrice.com
Think you’re getting a great deal? How awesome is that website’s price versus what you could be getting somewhere else? For deal hunters and bargain shoppers, the Internet is a boon. The trouble is, just because you found something for $3 cheaper doesn’t mean you’re justified in the five hours of online surfing you did to find it.
A lot of price matching, gouging, or linking sites have appeared over the Web’s lifetime. Each has hoped to show users how to find something cheaper or to get a better deal. Most of them weren’t very good at it, but a few have held on.
CrushMyPrice.com is one of the latest in that series of sites. The good news is, it does a pretty good job of it. It’s not nearly as hit-or-miss as other sites I’ve tried in this genre.
The app itself is simple: just a page with three fields to be filled out and a submit (Crush My Price) button. All you have to do is enter the name of the product, a link to it from an online retailer, and the price it’s listed for. Click “Crush My Price” and results are shown beneath the form, replacing the tag cloud of popular item searches recently made on the site.
I tried it with several products from various outlets online. Since the site is so easy to use and requires no signup or any other information to work, my job testing was pretty easy.
I tried a few items from Amazon.com and had pretty good results. One item failed to be located anywhere else (though it did come up with similar ones), but the other three worked fine. The miss was on a DVD set from George Carlin and the hits were on one DVD, one CD (album), and one book.
I tried it again with two Overstock items (both crushed), with an item from JCPenney.com (crushed mightily), and two from Egghead. The first Egghead try missed results, giving me unrelated items, but the other was crushed by Office Max, of all places.
Overall, some misses are expected. A script can only do so much and until computers can think abstractly like humans (well, most of us anyway), subjective things like this are going to be a little buggy. On the other hand, the percentage of hits was very good for a site like this.
I’d say that since it’s so easy to use, it is definitely worth the trouble to check your prices at CrushMyPrice before you buy. You never know.
