Wanted: Website Review Find It For Less

[nick-harper]

After a few months of pestering and asking for help testing / opinions the site has finally gone live.

http://www.finditforless.co.uk/

What does it do?

Find It For Less is a mashup of a couple of different sites. You can see the latest offers online and you can also use the product search to find an item you want, for less WHILE getting cashback!

Why is this unique? (I know people will ask)

This is a cashback / offers / price comparison site with a difference . That difference is that the user earns commission also when they buy something / post an offer / refer a user. Simply by posting offers you have found online, you an earn cashback when somebody else buys it. Just share something on Facebook and if somebody buys it through your link, you get cashback.

Yes, there are sites like HotUKDeals where they have the offers but the end user doesn't get anything. On Find It For Less the person who posts the offer will get cashback, the person who buys it will get cashback and even the people who refered both users will get cashback.

For every person a user refers, they get 5% of their cashback for life also.

If any of you guys are interested in actually using it as well as giving feedback then just use the voucher code launch14 to get £1 added to your balance!

Is it one of those dodgy sites? (I know people will think)

No, it really isn't dodgy. It is simple, the more you post offers / share links / buy through the site then the more cashback you will get.

Any feedback / opinions / thoughts would be great

Thanks

 

[Murray]

First impression was the homepage was just all merged together, bit overwhelimg, didn't know what the site was about or what I was suppose to do

 

[Adam H]

First impression was the homepage was just all merged together, bit overwhelimg, didn't know what the site was about or what I was suppose to do

I thought similar, I feel that the product search and today's top offers a should be the focus for the homepage, the earning bit could be done differently or displayed somewhere else other than where it is and the major retailers logo's could be displayed at the bottom out of the way or removed.

Nice concept though Nick, wish you all the very best with it .

 

[Jamie101]

Viewing from my mobile but looks like an interesting site. It's great that the site has so many features but at the same time this means it's hard to figure out what it actually does/why I should use it.

Maybe an explainer video would help with this? I like the cashback side of the site, have thought of something similar in the past but then wondered what type of people would actually use it. If you know anything about affiliate marketing it's not too hard to use Skimlinks or something to try get commission from sharing links online.

What sort of service are you using for the cheapest prices and so on? Assume it's an API call.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

 

[scottmccloud]

Sorry Nick, but it's no lowprices.co.uk.

 

[devilsrefugee]

How is the cash back generated? I like the design, but I'd go with a sticky nav personally.

 

[diablo]

Love the name and the concept. Best of luck with this one. I hope this is the start of something huge for you.

 

[tifosi]

Ok, who's searching for the didos!

 

[ian]

Ok, who's searching for the didos!

http://www.finditforless.co.uk/search/didos

 

[Tricky1]

The shop logos seem to be a bit hidden, why not revert them to how they should look to add a bit of colour to the homepage which, to be honest, looks a bit too flat.

 

[Retired_Member38]

If a user searches for something its generating a url for this search which can get indexed, linking to the url from the navigation and then suggesting further searches, all of which can get indexed (and create similar searches, which just continues to infinity)

This setup seems tailor made to send you straight to oblivion.... a Google penalty or filter is a near certainty imho. You can't auto generate pages, and have those pages auto generate pages, and have those....

I know its one thing to say okay I don't care so much about natural google rankings, but its another altogether to set out with a business model that all but guarantees you're going to get whacked.

 

[nick-harper]

How is the cash back generated? I like the design, but I'd go with a sticky nav personally.

The cash back comes direct from the Affiliate Agencies (awin, td, cj, skimlinks etc)

 

[nick-harper]

If a user searches for something its generating a url for this search which can get indexed, linking to the url from the navigation and then suggesting further searches, all of which can get indexed (and create similar searches, which just continues to infinity)

This setup seems tailor made to send you straight to oblivion.... a Google penalty or filter is a near certainty imho. You can't auto generate pages, and have those pages auto generate pages, and have those....

I know its one thing to say okay I don't care so much about natural google rankings, but its another altogether to set out with a business model that all but guarantees you're going to get whacked.

To be honest the business model doesn't really include Google too much, yes it is nice to be top of Google for everything but being realistic it is going to relay on different traffic sources (social media, forums etc) as hopefully it will be the users generating traffic in return for cashback.

It is in the user's interest to share it, post it, like it as they can get cashback easily then, without spending anything

There isn't a loop on the pages generated, it just has the page for the search results for people to link to. I may noindex them going forward if it seems to be having much of a negative issue.

 

[nick-harper]

Viewing from my mobile but looks like an interesting site. It's great that the site has so many features but at the same time this means it's hard to figure out what it actually does/why I should use it.

Maybe an explainer video would help with this? I like the cashback side of the site, have thought of something similar in the past but then wondered what type of people would actually use it. If you know anything about affiliate marketing it's not too hard to use Skimlinks or something to try get commission from sharing links online.

What sort of service are you using for the cheapest prices and so on? Assume it's an API call.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

Yeah I had an explainer video made, but the guy didn't actually take the time to actually explain, it was just a dodgy advert.

The service that powers it is my own system that has been developed, it still uses feeds from Aw, Td etc etc but they are hosted with me, updated hourly as it makes it a lot quicker to get the results to the end user as trying to call 6 or 7 different API's, return the data, sort the data it is a nightmare.

I have started to write some content to try and get across how it works - http://support.finditforless.co.uk/hc/en-us/categories/200362641-Find-It-For-Less-Points-Cashback , I understand about the homepage so will try to simplify it to explain.

 

[nick-harper]

The shop logos seem to be a bit hidden, why not revert them to how they should look to add a bit of colour to the homepage which, to be honest, looks a bit too flat.

Thanks, I agree. I am hopefully going to re-work the homepage. It is the page I have wrestled with most to get it to look good and explain how the site works.

 

[Retired_Member38]

To be honest the business model doesn't really include Google too much,...

There is a world of difference between "not relying on Google much" and "can't even rank for Find It For Less or Finditforless.co.uk" though. The latter is basically a disaster.

 

[nick-harper]

There is a world of difference between "not relying on Google much" and "can't even rank for Find It For Less or Finditforless.co.uk" though. The latter is basically a disaster.

Yep of course, it has all been taken into consideration

 

[bonusmedia]

The more I think about it the more I like this model - it's really pretty clever.
Getting your users to generate your content is brilliant.

Great to see something that has real USPs and tech behind it instead of another 'me-too' site.
If you can resolve the search issues I can see it doing well.

I take it you only offer cashback on deals where you can replace the link with an affiliate one? Is that automated?

I tried cashback sites years ago and got put off by the fact that it took months to get anything and even then half of what I bought didn't track correctly, despite making sure cookies were cleared first etc.

How are you managing the admin and customer service on that? It must be a bit of a nightmare to track everything, Quidco etc had a fair bit of funding behind them and took on a lot of staff I think.

Is the cashback enough incentive to get people posting offers so far? I can see it would be once the site is established but getting people to trust you could be tricky early on, lots of sites pop up promising rewards down the line but few deliver.

 

[nick-harper]

The more I think about it the more I like this model - it's really pretty clever.
Getting your users to generate your content is brilliant.

Great to see something that has real USPs and tech behind it instead of another 'me-too' site.
If you can resolve the search issues I can see it doing well.

I take it you only offer cashback on deals where you can replace the link with an affiliate one? Is that automated?

I tried cashback sites years ago and got put off by the fact that it took months to get anything and even then half of what I bought didn't track correctly, despite making sure cookies were cleared first etc.

How are you managing the admin and customer service on that? It must be a bit of a nightmare to track everything, Quidco etc had a fair bit of funding behind them and took on a lot of staff I think.

Is the cashback enough incentive to get people posting offers so far? I can see it would be once the site is established but getting people to trust you could be tricky early on, lots of sites pop up promising rewards down the line but few deliver.

Yes at the minute Cashback is only offered on the places who will actually pay out, when somebody adds an offer it will pop up to tell them whether they should earn or not. On the offers ie - http://www.finditforless.co.uk/offers/tefal-gh806115-actifry-plus-fryer-17 it will tell you whether the offer is eligible for points.

At the minute it is me and my wife who will look after it as much as possible. As much of it as possible is automated with the agencies for things like Transaction status etc.

An idea I have had is to hire moderators once the site is running a bit better with more users and trusted members. In return for them helping, they will get a higher rate of Cashback

I have done a fair bit of testing and the tracking has been pretty accurate so far, I track clicks before they get to the end site also so if for some reason they didn't track to the user, it will check the "click time" for clicks that it could be from that store so I can see if something has gone wrong.

I know what you mean about the Cashback from posting offers, but it is straight down the line and hoping people can trust it enough to give it a go and see for themselves as I am hoping for this to be a long term site with a good reputation. I wouldn't be able to sleep at night if it was ripping people off.

Currently looking into the rules and regs about handing out actual money (rather than the gift cards now).

Another cool feature is when offers expire, say you land on the site looking for a Lego advent calendar but that offers has expired, it will throw related prices at you - http://www.finditforless.co.uk/offers/lego-city-60063-lego-city-advent-calendar-15

 

[philiporchard]

Doesn't someone else have a site like this on AD to do with cheapest prices?