Your online shopping addiction may have gotten a little easier to handle. An Austin company is beta testing a new online price comparison tool. Impossible Ventures LLC has created a product called WikiBuy that wants you to “Know the best price. Automatically.” WikiBuy and Impossible Ventures LLC’s CEO is Jonathan Coon who founded 1800Contacts.
The tool is a Google Chrome extension that searches for the best prices on the Internet once shoppers have placed an item in their shopping cart. The search also includes any applicable coupons. After the price comparison window pops up (including tax and shipping costs), the customer makes their purchase through WikiBuy’s secure servers. Retailers then pay the site for the orders, thus making the need for an ad-based model irrelevant. Initial signup is easy, and the questions (there are only a few) ask if you want to add Amazon Prime to your results.
It does take a bit of time for the process to work, but it is doing a lot of extra research that you don’t have to. Customers can continue shopping or browsing in another tab and a pop up will alert you when results are ready.
I tried out WikiBuy with a GoPro Hero4 (silver) and after 3 minutes it came back with a savings of $19 over Amazon, if I wanted to buy it on eBay. The results yielded 11 product matches and included three product suggestions at the end.
According to its LinkedIn page, WikiBuy is currently hiring for a Personal Assistant and Product Designer.
