Tagging a dead deal

[mbony]

Brad or Ross, is there a way to tag a deal as dead for gd.com. Maybe not take the deal down all together, but once the deal was tagged you could pull the new price and make the deal as 'over'?

 

Thoughts?

[Brad]

Something like that would be nearly impossible to do, both for time and coding reasons.

 

First of all, we have way too many deals to constantly check them all to see if they are still valid. We could post a deal for an MP3 player at Amazon for $99 on Monday, on Wednesday Amazon could raise the price to $119, and then drop it back to $99 on Friday. Unless we check every deal every day, something like that is impossible.

 

And as for having it automated, very few retailers provide updated pricing in a format that is easy to use (such as Amazon's AWS XML system) so it would again be virtually impossible to do it without coming up with screen-scraping scripts for every retailer we post deals for, and then having to update them everytime a retailer makes a change to how they display items. Plus there are always coupons and rebates that can affect a deal, all with different expiration dates. We do display "Coupon Expired" instead of the coupon link for a deal that had used an expired coupon, but that's the best we can do for now.

 

So basically it is not possible. If a deal goes dead the same day we post it, we can make the change and update it, but otherwise it is just too hard.

 

Another option is to have a way for visitors to mark a deal as dead, and then have it display that note if enough people mark it dead, but that could easily be abused by our jealous competitors, so we don't want to do that.

 

So if you have any other suggestions as to how we could do it without spending hours every day going through hundreds of deals, please let us know.

[Aaron]

As for deals posted by members on the message board (forums), the title of the thread could be changed. For example a deal thread labeled "25% off at Hallmark stores" could be changed to "[DEAD] 25% off at Hallmark stores" but I agree with the other statements made by Brad.