Dealighted is a relatively new deals / bargains website. It describes itself as:

dealighted is a selection of today’s best deals + many deal forums combined into one.

Under its nice and clean user interface, it is actually two different sites. You have a deals aggregator that analyses forum threads in major deal forums, and you also get a price comparison website that is actually powered by ResellerRatings and Shopping.com.

Honestly, Dealighted has actually been under the spotlight over the last couple of days as the owner went on ReviewMe shopping spree and got the heavy weights like John Chow and Jeremy Shoemaker to review it. Although I reckon Yan from ProBargainHunter.com has probably done the most comprehensive review for this site. I’ll see how mine goes :)

Deals Aggregator

When you knock on Dealighted’s front door, what welcomes you will be its deals aggregator.

It is not the typical feed aggregator that dumps every link back to you. Instead, it analyses most recent threads from 6 different forums over 4 sites (Anantech Hot Deals, FatWallet, GottaDeal and SlickDeals), and only spills out the ones that it finds “interesting”. For example, currently it says:

dealighted analyzed
496 new deal forum threads today and identified 113 that people really like.

Now, how does Dealighted figured out that some deal threads people like, and some people don’t? There are a few determining factors that are presented on that aggregated result —

1. how recent the thread is,
2. how many people have replied to the original thread, and
3. how many people have viewed the thread

All these three attributes are probably scrapped off the forums. Then Dealighted’s secret recipes are applied to these threads and working out which deal threads have enough “scores” to be promoted to the front page. It is a bit like Digg or Digg-like social bargain hunting sites (DealsPlus, Dealigg for example), except all the posting and voting are done off site! What Dealighted does is simply aggregated them into a single listing.

I can imagine that this part of Dealighted is all fully automated. Dealighted relies on the fact that all the hard work spent on other partnering forum sites, and it only needs to present analysed result to its own readers, showing only the best deals. You can also use the search box to find old discussions on a specific product you are looking for. How good is that?!

Except it does not really work for me. There are a few issues with Dealighted’s aggregator that hinders its usefulness.

• Flat list without categories or folkonomy/tags makes browsing much harder. There is a “tag cloud”, but it is in fact just weighted list of query keywords.
• No RSS feed for “Today’s Best User Submitted Deals”. I thought every single site has RSS feed these days.
• Deal listing with only title + link feels a bit lacking. Users will be more inclined to click through if product image and/or thread excerpt are included.
• Why login and add comment on Dealighted, when you could participate in a more lively discussion on the actual deal thread?

Conclusion: It is not bad as an automated service, but not as useful as it seems.

Price Comparison

If you click on the gadget images at top, or use the search box that says “What are you shopping for”, you will be brought to Dealighted’s price comparison site.

The price comparison site lets you see the product images, as well as listing all the merchants selling this specific model, from cheapest to most expensive. You can then click through and buy from the merchant of your choice.

Price comparison part of Dealighted does look like a completely separate site from its deal aggregating side. In fact it is powered by ResellerRatings.com, which is owned by the same person who started Dealighted. Neither does ResellerRatings.com provide the actual price comparison engine through. ResellerRatings.com provides rating for the resellers, but the actual price comparison is done through shopping.com’s API call.

Combining the Two…

Dealighted could have been two separated sites. However there is a tiny bit of integration between the deals aggregator and the price comparison engine. When you look at a product, the first tab at right next to Store offers will list all the related deals. So there you have it — a product that you might be interested in, a list of shops that sell this item, and a list of recently analysed deal threads that are related to this product item.

Conclusion

While Dealighted is pretty much irrelevant to us Aussies, but I do like the idea of these full-automated sites. However, they can also be easily replicated with a few days of code hacking. To make an automated site stands out, you need to provide more than just “showing threads with more than x replies and y page views”. Integrating with a price comparison engine is a good start, but I think Dealighted still needs a bit of work to make it generally useful.