PoachIt: All-in-one Price Tracker & Coupon Code finder?
Price tracking apps aren’t necessarily new. What might set PoachIt apart (maybe), is how streamlined it looks and feels. It’s an extension you add to your browser, and with a few clicks, you can have PoachIt track the price of an item you’ve got your eye on, or, dig up a coupon code to use if you’re ready to buy.
In theory.
Install the extension and browse online. See something you like, and click the button in the upper right corner of your browser. When you do that, a screen pops up. Here’se an example, using the new J. Crew Ludlow blue flannel blazer:
“Click on the relevant image”? I’m on the blue flannel ludlow’s product page. No idea where PoachIt picked up the brown English wool ludow blazer on the right from. And why are there two identical images of the flannel sportcoat? Strange. Well, for the record, I chose the blue flannel ludlow… on the left. And then this screen appeared:
Waitaminute, what do you mean “done” or “view coupons“? Does that mean codes and coupons aren’t part of the price tracking system? To most consumers, the price DOES indeed “drop” if a code can be applied to an item (say a code was running for 25% off $150+, and blazers weren’t excluded). Maybe clicking “view coupons” will provide a code out there that’ll work on the blazer…
So PoachIt has come up with the 25% off select items code “SHOPNOW” that’s been running since last week. But those select items are few and far between, and this blazer wasn’t one of those items. Gave it a shot anyway, and…
Yeah. No. According to PoachIt: “80% of the coupons on the web don’t work. Ours do!” Fair enough, but just because it’s a working coupon, doesn’t mean it’s working on the item you’re looking to “poach”. There are exclusions, must spend thresholds, etc.
Providing working coupons doesn’t always guarantee you’re getting the right/best coupons. That was the problem with “honey”. Sometimes, there’d be a clearly visible coupon on a retailer’s page (say, JCF) and honey couldn’t find any coupon codes. Sure, they didn’t provide a bogus code, but a real live-working code was staring it in the face, and it couldn’t find it. To be fair, that might not happen with PoachIt. But showing a code on a product’s page that isn’t up for that deal might be confusing to some.
Meanwhile, PoachIt’s image-based system seems to struggle picking up JUST what you’re out to buy. On Amazon, PoachIt doesn’t do so hot in figuring out what to track on an item’s page. Headed on over to track a pair of Walnut Strands, and PoachIt didn’t know what the hell was being sold:
It’s the SHOES POACHIT. BEHIND YOU.
Took seven clicks of that arrow on the right to scroll through and actually find the Strands. Not necessarily confidence building, and who knows if PoachIt took into consideration that I selected my size, 10.5D. If I get an alert that 8.5EEEs are on sale, that’ll be disappointing.
It’s certainly a nifty little tool. Easy to use, and the design is super-clean and to the point. But the issues with PoachIt figuring out just what’s on sale, the “relative product image” confusion, as well as the potential lack of integration of codes into the price tracking bottom line are concerning. Got a bunch of things being tracked by PoachIt, so we’ll see what happens.
Do you use any of these price tracking apps/extensions? Leave it all in the comments below. Meanwhile, many thanks to reader Adam T. for sending in the style tip on PoachIt.
I count on the elves at Dappered to do that stuff for me.
Beat me to it.
I’m with you man – this stuff may one day get super sophisticated, able to crank out hundreds of thousands of sale promos in the blink of an eye. But it simply won’t be able to “offer without comment” or throw me a thursday handful…or correct itself when wrong…or argue with me.
I’ll stick with the humans.
Camelizer and Honey are both pretty useful browser addons in my experience.
Honey is the coupon aggregate, that works not unlike what you’ve described. Unobtrusive until you get to the checkout screen, then it runs through available coupons one at a time.
Camelizer tracks price adjustments done regularly on Amazon, Best Buy, and others, allowing you to put a threshold price which you would purchase the product, by examining the price change history lows. It also syncs with your Amazon wish list, notifying you when a price of an item on your list drops.
I use honey and invisible hand.
Why use Poachit when we already have Joe?
I’ve been considering building something like this for a while, but more sophisticated. It’s a much more convoluted undertaking than most realize, especially given the lack of standardization of identifiers across vendors and poor semantic tagging in most sites. There are ways to show only coupon codes that work and mitigate the “select which item you mean” issue, but, alas, I have too many projects right now. Maybe someday when I have the time…
In my experience, I’ve been better off Googling the name of the company/website followed by “promo code”. IE, “banana republic promo code”. This usually gets me to the RetailMeNot website, and sometimes a random site with a good code. I suppose it’s not as efficient as the app, but it works well.