If a kid screams in the restaurant and they have a policy of giving him a free lollipop to calm him down, that doesn't mean we need an app to keep track of the restaurants you've visited without claiming your free lollipop and then hire a company to go around with an automated screaming device to coax dozens of lollipops out of the local businesses.
This seems like the kind of company that would spoil this particular form of customer service. It just seems like greed more than any real value.
Now, those old scummy companies that used to offer rebates while employing actuaries to calculate percentage chance that you won't cash the rebate, intentionally make the process difficult, and then profit? Go ahead and run those guys into the ground. If someone could upload a scan of the rebate and have you guys do the rest, I wouldn't mind that.
But I'd challenge you on your assumption that this is a bad thing for stores and consumers.
It's a powerfully negative experience to buy something, and then find out within a few days (or hours) that it's selling for far less. It happens millions of times per day (www.forbes.com/sites/walterloeb/2014/11/20/amazons-pricing-strategy-makes-life-miserable-for-the-competition/), and most people don't find out. But the reality is that it's happening.
A customer could return it for free (and re-buy it -- many states require this by-law). Or a store could do good by the customer and give a price adjustment.
It turns out that when stores do good by customers when this happens, shoppers become far more loyal (and spend FAR more on average too, growing store top-line & often net bottom line). This is part of the secret of Amazon Prime.
While I can't claim that it is the right or only view, I fully believe that stores will benefit far more than the costs.
I love a good story, but I think you're embellishing this one a bit much. It sounds a little like "We're rescuing victimized consumers from abusive companies employing teams of uptight actuaries intent on nickel-and-diming you wherever they can".
They might very well be conniving, but your app to me feels more like those people that save up a bunch of coupons and walk out with a cart full of groceries and the grocery store actually owing them money. There's nothing wrong with that: I have no doubt that the CEO of Fred Meyer still rues that day in college that I walked into one of his aisles and walked out with a bunch of cartons of eggs.
People aren't victims when a company offers a product at a price that the customer is willing to accept. I'm sure you have a fine app that will save some people some money, but we're not rebels striking an uprising against our grocery store overlords who dare to sell overpriced eggs to underprivileged American consumers.
(edit): The parent post has been edited to sound less like a movie trailer, so my post may now sound out-of-place.
This is totally irrelevant to the parent's point, that point being that Paribus seems to be defecting in the refunds-when-reasonable game in a way that will probably harm consumers in the long run. It irritates me that you just wrote a bunch of talking points. Your response downthread was a lot better.
(Disclaimer: I use Paribus but it never got me any money yet.)
Is it like a kid screaming and paying people to shake down restaurants? Not really. The essence of the problem solved is information asymmetry. To see this, break the app into two apps -- one that simply informs you that you missed out on a deal and makes you feel bad, and one that compensates you and makes you feel better by giving you a savings.
This is a side-payment, as in Coase's theorem. You are outraged at the side-payment, but that just hides the information asymmetry under a cloak of disgust. There is no valid reason that the purchaser should not learn the price subsequently dropped -- but the nature of homo economicus being what it is no one will use the first app without the second.
This app is an application of Coase's theorem, and takes an externality (uninformed consumers are like a clean river to dump bad pricing into at a profit) and internalizes that cost by making companies pay it -- it is always better for the market if costs are internalized, assuming markets work at all.
It doesn't matter whether the company or the consumer pays, according to Coase's theorem. The result will be the same. We might invent reasons to be outraged that the company pays, but really all that has happened is a market inefficiency -- information asymmetry -- has been eliminated. Prices are less sticky and more flexible. This is good.
>This seems like the kind of company that would spoil this particular form of customer service.
I strongly disagree with this, and I have some real world evidence to backup my point of view that companies want customers to take advantage of these policies. Walmart has a feature in their app called Savings Catcher. When you buy something from there, you simply hold the receipt's bar code under your phone's camera for a few seconds. They automatically keep track of the prices of every single item you bought. When prices drop within the policy period, it is added to your Savings Catcher balance, which can be transferred to a virtual Walmart gift card for spending at any time the customer chooses.
If one of the world's largest retailers finds value in automating this process for their own customers, I can't imagine that other companies with this exact policy in place have a problem with people taking advantage of it.
On the one hand, I'd rather Amazon and others not manipulate pricing to squeeze a couple extra pence from their customers, on the other hand, exploiting social norms undermines society and eventually you lose those nice things in life you could count on in a given society.
One data point: I signed up for the service ~ 6 months ago. I do ~ $200 in Amazon purchases a month.
I got my first rebate last night: 50 cents back on some RAM that had dropped in price the day after I purchased it. For anyone who is concerned about email permissions, here's the email (automatically sent from my personal account) to Amazon:
Subject: I was charged more than current price
Hey,
I am writing you to ask for a price adjustment review on a recently placed purchase. Please reference: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/xxxx and xxx.
I ordered a Crucial 16GB Kit (8GBx2) DDR3L-1600 SODIMM Memory for Mac (CT2K8G3S160BM ) for $66.99 on January 10.
However this afternoon I noticed that the price is $0.50 less than the amount I was charged, as it decreased to $66.49. As I bought the item recently, and the price has been significantly discounted, would it be possible for you to please start processing a post-order price adjustment refund?
Many thanks for your outstanding customer service.
Best,
Roy Murdock
The service also attaches a screenshot of the shipping confirmation to the email automatically, which is pretty cool.
I suspect that I would get more value from the service if I purchased a higher volume of commodity/low price goods on Amazon, especially computing parts that are essentially guaranteed to go down in price within the near future. Overall, it's great to have this sort of protection from dropped prices and is definitely worth the email access permissions in my opinion - but at the first sign of a data breach or privacy issue, I will drop the service immediately. I am not affiliated with Paribus in any way.
I randomly got one for a Christmas present I ordered. Went down from almost $40 to $30. Good savings percentage-wise, and nice to see it happen in an automated fashion.
Though I did sign up like a year ago and this was the first time I had heard anything (totally forgot about it until now).
I was using this for a couple months and it saved me a bit of money, but in the end I couldn't get over the idea of a third party having total access to my email account -- which is total access to every account I own (banks, social media, everything). It just weirds me out. I canceled the service and changed my email password.
I couldn't sign up using an email address that has a + in it. (My amazon email is abcd+amazon@gmail.com). Could you get paribus not to flag it as invalid?
It would seem that other than being a little more automated (giving anyone access to my email however is a deal breaker in my book), this Paribus service wouldn't seem to have any real advantages over (what appears to be) a competing service from Citibank: https://www.citipricerewind.com
A compare/contrast on the Paribus website would be helpful.
I see statements that Paribus doesn't sell customer data, but on the Paribus blog, I see analytics run against what appears to be customer data. That dichotomy concerns me.
Are there any limits on how often a customer can request a rebate? What happens if the customer hits that limit? Will a company "fire" a customer, as can happen to people who return items too frequently?
I'm also surprised to see that Citibank has a patent in this area…
One major caveat that I just recently discovered - purchases made through Amazon are only covered if they're actually sold by Amazon, not through a third-party reseller and fulfilled by Amazon.
If you change your purchasing habits to choose items only sold by Amazon, you could quickly exceed any possible savings by paying the higher direct price than you'd pay for the same product (with the same shipping time) that you'd get from a third-party merchant.
Just an FYI if you're thinking about signing up for the service.
This thing needs a fucking threshold mechanic. I just signed up and it sent 3 refund requests all for around 50 cents. That's just embarrassing. I contemplated cancelling my account before I realized the damage (the emails) had already been done. If it does this again before a threshold mechanic is implemented, I'll be definitely closing my account.
Founder here. Definitely a common first reaction, but we've found that on average shoppers become far more loyal (and spend more, growing store top-line & often net bottom line) when this happens.
You might think we're crazy, but we fully believe (and have data to back up) that we're helping these stores far more than the costs.
You should take it a step further and help the retailers add this as a feature to their own apps -- having a store app should include a promise that if the store lowers prices, it will refund the difference for purchases in the last week (or whatever time frame) to loyal customers, perhaps through a store credit. It's a dandy reason to drive adoption of the app.
One thing you should listen to is the number of people who want a reserve price (transaction threshold). This price setting is pure economic gold as information goes -- it tells you their risk aversion (probably) and the shape of their utility curve for extra income. I'm sure it correlates with income, and gives independent verification of income, statistically.
If you have 5 big retailers using your app feature internally, offer to build them a network they can join, to make their rebate offer even more attractive to participants.
With the stores' aid, you can circumvent the problems with email permissions, which frankly are going to limit your adoption. You are far better off working with the stores in a partnership I think, and helping them to understand their own customers' reserve price (and hence propensity for returns and chargebacks, which they surely care about), than being a 'gotcha' adversary.
Selling this as a service to the merchants seems like a great idea. It would feel less creepy than allowing Yet Another App access to my inbox and credit card details.
Supplying merchants is also likely to provide a more _predictable_ income.
However...
Are giants like Amazon really likely to listen to a pitch from a startup, even one incubated at YC? (No snark, genuine question.)
There is another option: open source the product and give it away, charging for the hosted service. Obviously this may not be an option for Paribus, which would be a shame.
I was thinking the exact same thing. To expand, if retailers get upset and try to work against this in any effective manner, doesn't that just put them out of business? It's like basing a business off another company's api without asking for permission or verifying that you're not violating ToS. They could just pull the plug on you at any moment. This seems like a very perilous business strategy..
Instead of linking to my email address, which I would never allow, let me just forward the relevant emails to you, i.e. to a special email address linked to me account.
It's pretty easy to add a rule in most email providers that forward only message matching certain patterns - you could even provide documentation of what patterns to include.
If i understand what you mean correctly, this is what tripit.com does (and they do it very well). I just forward plane/hotel bookings and it get imported into my account straight away.
I've used Paribus, and although I'm not usually a fan of letting services connect to my email (even the one I use for shopping), I like it. I've received a few refunds from products that I have pre-ordered and then watched the price drop the day after it came out. Amazon has been happy to honor all these requests so far.
Create a completely new email account only for Amazon. Connect it to Paribus, and then forward it to your main email account. Your privacy concerns will be limited to whatever Paribus does with your Amazon purchase history.
I'm currently subscribed and using it. I'm an amazon prime subscriber who makes several purchases a month and so far it's returned $1.68 back to me. As a free service, awesome.
It's effectively free since their obtaining refunds on your behalf that you otherwise might not have, but it's not technically free since they take a cut of the refunds.
I've been using this since April, and do a ton of shopping on Amazon. I've saved $27 since joining, and since I wouldn't have checked those, I consider it free savings. One negative is that it doesn't support the 2-FA for Amazon.
We don't sell user data and we make money by taking a cut of the savings we're able to claim on behalf of our users. It aligns our incentives and keeps us focused on maximizing the savings our users get.
We started building Paribus when we realized that most retailers were actually using PII and user information to price discriminate and overcharge their customers. The last thing we want to do is help enable these practices.
Yet. Do you offer an iron-clad guarantee you won't in the future? Otherwise it seems like the first thing you'll do if investors start to put pressure on you...
This seems like the kind of company that would spoil this particular form of customer service. It just seems like greed more than any real value.
Now, those old scummy companies that used to offer rebates while employing actuaries to calculate percentage chance that you won't cash the rebate, intentionally make the process difficult, and then profit? Go ahead and run those guys into the ground. If someone could upload a scan of the rebate and have you guys do the rest, I wouldn't mind that.