from Hacker News

Paribus (YC S15) saves you money when items you purchased online drop in price

by ericglyman on 1/13/16, 9:05 PM with 48 comments

• by MichaelBurge on 1/13/16, 9:47 PM

  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.

• by roymurdock on 1/13/16, 9:40 PM

  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.

• by mmanfrin on 1/13/16, 9:43 PM

  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.

• by cemregr on 1/13/16, 11:41 PM

  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?

• by OopsCriticality on 1/13/16, 10:24 PM

  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…

• by gervase on 1/13/16, 10:00 PM

  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.

• by bitwarrior on 1/14/16, 1:17 AM

  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.

• by jonaldomo on 1/13/16, 10:11 PM

  While this is cool, isn't the concern that a retailer would get upset and change a policy to prevent this from happening? What's the end game here?

• by TheBiv on 1/13/16, 9:26 PM

  Seemingly really cool service.

  I don't know if I want to authenticate my email address with them though.

  It seems to me like Amazon/Best Buy/etc next move will be to add a provision that "You must submit a claim not through an automated service"

• by rangersanger on 1/13/16, 10:34 PM

  I've been on the service for a few months as well and have been refunded ~$100.

  Another possibility- Amazon just coopts the idea and rolls it into a feature of prime, ala Orbitz.

• by ars on 1/14/16, 7:13 AM

  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.

• by ddavidn on 1/13/16, 10:42 PM

  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.

• by Nemant on 1/14/16, 5:27 AM

  How is Paribus taking that 25% cut? Do I have to put my banking details in the app?

• by sirtastic on 1/13/16, 9:33 PM

  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.

• by pragmatic on 1/14/16, 12:46 AM

  How does this compare to Walmart's savings catcher? https://savingscatcher.walmart.com/

  It appears that savings catcher is only for current prices, not prices that drop later.

• by moonka on 1/13/16, 10:28 PM

  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.

• by stephenitis on 1/14/16, 2:24 AM

  I've used it and am awaiting the result of a $26 dollar request from Target. (dropped prices on barstools)

• by eachro on 1/13/16, 9:53 PM

  Does Paribus get anything out of this besides data? Do company's buy Paribus's data?

• by crocowhile on 1/14/16, 10:33 AM

  Will this work with amazon uk?