With the hope of bridging the worlds of social networking and online shopping, Wikidealz.com officially launched in late November.
The site has been in the works for about six months, says co-founder Joe Farrier. The concept is that deal-consumers share bargains they've found around the Internet. Members can earn cash when they post deals that lead to sales from participating Wikidealz retailers.
"Most shopping sites work through the affiliate model, they get paid based on commission for any sales that they lead to," says Farrier. But, he adds, not everyone works with affiliates, and this is limiting for consumers.
Farrier and his partner and co-founder Josef Salerno looked at the Craigslist model. That site makes money off of job postings in seven cities and apartment postings in NYC, but the majority of their content is free.
"They've created an extremely usable and useful system for the people they're directing product to," notes Farrier. "We want to create something that is very useful for consumers, whether they post items that are with an affiliate program or not."
Salerno adds that the community aspect will particularly come into play when it comes to rating the sites where deals are offered.
"We want the community to compete and post the best deals they can find," he says. "Everyone is rating each other's deals and posts…it adds a level of trust to what you buy."
"Of course want affiliate postings but we don't have any intent to be biased towards affiliates," says Farrier. "We want the site to be consumer driven."
Users will have the ability to request that offers from sites they don't like or consider disreputable be excluded from listings they view, says Salerno. "This will help us see which sites people trust and don't trust."
The current profile is, not surprisingly, online shoppers who like to look around for good deals. "They won't be hard to transition into the model," says Farrier. "The intent is to build up the trust and establish ourselves to people who maybe aren't Internet shoppers."
Public relations is currently the main promotional tool for the site. "We want to build word of mouth," says Farrier."
"If the [deal is with] an affiliate site, there is an incentive for people to put deals on their blogs or MySpace pages," says Salerno. "[For example,] if someone has a blog about natural mothering, can post a deal on Wikideals about a site that has a good price on cloth diapers. It will allows users and bloggers to really focus on what they would like to promote."
