Thursday, December 31, 2009

Slick Deals

A colleague brought Slick Deals to my attention. This site, located at http://slickdeals.net/, is not fancy, but it accomplishes its objective of collecting great online deals in one place admirably. One way to use this site is to check it periodically for the best deals, but you can also sign up for SlickDeal Alerts.

I also like the principles behind the sites' stated SlickDeals Commitment:
• The deals are rated and vetted by users
• They research the deal and the price (including use of Pricegrabber and Google Products)
• Only the best, hand-picked deals will be posted (including filtering out of products with only niche interest, controversial products, deals requiring significant effort, and non-guaranteed deals [YMMV])
• Only reputable merchants are listed (on the front page) and focus is on online stores though some B&M stores' deals do get listed when the deal is great and the brick-and-mortar store is conveniently located for a wide part of the audience
• Advertisements and paid placements are never sold, marketed, or advertised as deals (ads do exist on the site, but are not marketed as deals)

There are advertisements on SlickDeals.net (that's what keeps the service free for the rest of us), but according to this commitment, advertisement dollars do not get a product or deal put on the front page. The front page is reserved for the best deals as determined by users. I have just started using this site, but my colleague has used it numerous times with numerous different vendors and has been happy with each purchase. I am a frequent Amazon.com customer, but my colleague who has used SlickDeals.net has often known about Amazon.com deals before me or even about some deals of which I was not aware.