Protect Yourself From Price Drops

Michael Arrington

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

PriceProtectr is a neat new tool that helps you take advantage of guarantees by many online retailers to refund the difference on purchased items if the price drops in the 30 or 60 days following your purchase (example – Best Buy’s policy). Those guarantees are great, but few people go to the trouble of following up and checking on any price changes for items they’ve purchased.

The company has put together a very simple website, even using a vowel dropping name and the generic web 2.0 logo generator that we’ve previously written about. To use it, you simply paste in the product URL from an ecommerce site (example) and your email address. The company will notify you if the price drops within the time period allowed by the retailer.

As of today, the site claims to have found over $57,000 in savings, with few people aware of the service. This might be something someone just put up for fun, but it is a useful tool. Frankly, retailers should email you themselves if the price drops, and if a service like this gets popular enough, they may start doing that. Supported sites include Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Backcountry.com, BestBuy.com, BestBuy.ca, Bike Nashbar, Circuit City, Cooking.com, Costco, Future Shop, Jenson USA, Office Max, Sears, 6th Avenue Electronics, Staples.com, Staples.ca, and Target. See Thrillist for their review as well.

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