Shoeboxed and Price Protectr, two sites we've written about in the past, joined forces on Monday in a partnership that's downright helpful to deal hunters. Any receipts sent in to the receipt scanning service will be parsed over for product names, then sent over to Price Protectr. If something you bought goes down in price within the return or exchange date, you'll be notified--potentially saving you some cash. That is as long as you've manually entered that item into Price Protectr.
Since Shoeboxed keeps copies of all your receipts, you can simply print out a copy from your browser to take into the store in case you've lost the original.
As part of the partnership, users of Price Protectr will get free one-month subscriptions to Shoeboxed's classic tier of service, which usually runs at $19.95 a month. After that, they'll have to keep paying that rate or bump up to the $60 a month professional plan. but considering all your purchases are being price checked for things like rebates and drops, it's an extra value add for small businesses buried in paperwork.
Update: I've been told by Dan Englander, Shoeboxed.com's VP of Communications, that the process of cross checking purchases with Price Protectr is not automatic, but that it's "something we may consider for the future." In the meantime, it's little more than a promotion to get users hooked on Shoeboxed's services. Users will still have to do the heavy lifting by going to Price Protectr's site and dropping in the product URL to track price drops.
I don't know about you, but I often find myself saying "I'd totally buy that if it cost $__ less." It happens to me all the time with items such as RAM, video cards, Windows Vista (joking), and the Amazon Kindle. Luckily there are two handy services to help keep tabs on prices for online goods.
The first, and newer of the two is called Waitable. It simply monitors the price of whatever items you put in either by URL, Amazon.com sales number, or UPC code. All you need to do is plug in what price you'd like to pay (a la Priceline) and it sends you an e-mail if the item is selling at or below your requested amount.
In addition to e-mail notifications, Waitable provides an RSS feed you can subscribe to, or plug into your favorite feed reader to avoid having to check your in-box. The service only works on Amazon.com at the moment, but after seeing what PriceProtectr (review) can do on price drops after you buy something, I can imagine seeing other online retailers making their way on there in the future.
The other service is called WishRadar, and has a larger emphasis on what you can do with the list of items you put together. You can create and share various wishlists ad nauseum. It also imports whatever pre-existing list of products you've got on your Amazon.com wishlist, along with a bookmarklet you can click to add any product you're looking at (on Amazon or Half.com) without having to copy and paste.
The one thing both of these services are missing is a way to view a product's life cycle to see if there have been any price drops or fluctuations in the past. For example, a pair of headphones I bought and use on a daily basis quite regularly jump from about $90 to $70 on Amazon, and neither of these services would tell you that. Likewise, predictive services such as Farecast, have created algorithms to tell what's going to happen to the future price of airfare--something that could potentially be automated with reoccurring life cycles of major electronic goods.
See also: Price Protectr: Watch for Price Drops without Watching
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