As you may have picked up on with my Black Friday article, I am definitely a fan of pursuing great deals, especially when it comes to electronics. When you think of deal sites and communities, Slick Deals and Fat Wallet probably come to mind first – and rightfully so with Slick Deals having over 140,000 members by itself. Dealighted.com is a relatively new service that aids the deal hunter by aggregating all of the deals in one central location.
Dealighted recently switched to a 3 column layout but I liked it more with 2 columns.
Features
Dealighted combines the hot deals, Black Friday and free stuff sections from Anandtech, Slick Deals, Fat Wallet and Gottadeal. It is updated frequently to keep up with the breakneck speed that deals emerge on these sites. Dealighted’s features are rather simplistic in nature – you can sign up for an account that allows you to adjust what deal sites are used as sources as well as slightly alter the format the deals are displayed (only hot threads, only new deals, forum style). Having an account also lets you save deals so you can quickly come back to them later on.
Things that could use some work
While I really like the whole dealighted experience and simplicity, I don’t think it brings much to the table. In its pure form, it is just an aggregator. Every deal link you click takes you to the actual deal site, which gets rather annoying when you use it for a while. It would be nice if clicking on the deal activated a little JavaScript action to display more information on the deal, as Slick Deals has. Briefly looking through their code, they’re already loading the Prototype JS library so it wouldn’t be too much work to implement a feature like this. Heck, I even did something like that with the RSS aggregator with user accounts I created for an information design project for school.
Actually, since I would really like to see this feature implemented here are some code snippets for the dealighted.com developers to take a look at. However, I am not sure how much of that is possible since several of the deals originate from forum threads and I don’t know how much detail you can get from a forum’s RSS feed.
[code lang="javascript"]function toggle(id) { //handy JS function for showing/hiding things
//a form of it is already in the prototype library
var monkey = document.getElementById(id);
if ( monkey.style.display != 'none' ) {
monkey.style.display = 'none';
}
else {
monkey.style.display = '';
}
}[/code]
[code lang="php"]< ?php global $id;
for ($x = 0; $x < $max; $x++) { //$max being # of items to display per page
$id = "description_" . $x; //creates a unique id for each element
//you're going to want to put the code for getting the feed items here
} ?>[/code]
[code lang="javascript"]Toggle Description
//how to activate show/hide action[/code]
[code lang="php"]
[/code]
Wrap-up
Until November 24th, dealighted is giving away a 50-inch plasma TV to one lucky person that has an account and has saved at least one deal. Dealighted is technically a “beta”, so hopefully if they take some of my constructive criticism into account they will have a greatly improved final version. I read through their privacy policy and terms of use and nothing fishy caught my eye. They do however log your IP, time of visit and referring site to help target advertisements but then again doesn’t everybody do that nowadays? Overall, I enjoyed using dealighted and expect to see some changes and feature additions in the near future.
Disclaimer: I was paid enough money to buy 500 packages (at the going rate of 25 cents each) of ramen noodles for this review.
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
The disclaimer explains the huge palette of Ramen in the garage. Very interesting aggregator however just with a cursory look over it seems to be full of junk deals that I personally could care less for. Perhaps as it matures the deals will get better but right now I don’t need any sick deals on Skin Care Products.
Haha, it was just showing you a hot deal from fatwallet. You can always make an account and get it to only show from other sources…
I’m one of the developers for dealighted. Thought I’d add my $0.02 and reply to your suggestions:
1) It is a bit more than an aggregator because the main page only shows you the most popular deals. A true aggregator would show you all deals from all deal sites (something like popurls).. Dealighted, for instance, is only showing the best 160 out of a total 766 deals for today, which should make it a lot easier than having to sift through 766 deals.
2) The All: Forum Style tab is pretty cool – it’s like looking at the slickdeals forum or the fatwallet forum, but you get to see all of the forums (and new thread replies) in one place.
3) I like your suggestion of showing the deal in a dropdown or other javascript effect, but I’m a bit concerned about the legality of “ripping” the deal text directly onto our site. I suppose if we retained the deal and its original link without alternation (ensuring that the deal site still gets the referral link credit for any sales), this might be okay, but would likely require each site’s permission.
4) If you signup for an account, you can save deals using an ajax save link as you’re browsing, so you could actually go through and save your deals, then visit the “my saved deals” link and visit all the deal threads after you’re done finding your favorite deals each day. This way you don’t have to interrupt your dealighted.com browsing by going to each deal site.
Thanks for the review and the feedback :).
Thanks for clearing things up Scott.
Scott, one suggestion about the service: allow viewers to combine similar coupons. When you have separate sources for tech deals, you’re bound to have multiple links to the same deal. I wish digg and other social news repositories did this.
I can’t find anything stating it’s a USA only service but it doesn’t seem to display deals outside that country. Am I missing something?
Daniel – as stated earlier, it pretty much aggregates those deal sites, so it all depends on what’s posted on the deal sites, which happen to have many US users.