Jellyfish SOTD - Up to 100% Off

November 1st, 2006 | Tech Bargains

Jellyfish.com, which has been known for their unique “cashback shopping” concept for some time, turned on a new service today. Actually, it’s more of a game… It’s called Smack Shopping Deal of the Day or SOTD (shouldn’t that be SSDOTD?), and it works like this:

They have a limited number of a popular product on hand from one of their sponsor stores. The product goes live around lunchtime on the East Coast, and as you watch, the net price clicks downward as your cashback amount grows. The trick is to time your purchase just right… can you save the most without waiting too long? If you wait one second too long, the screen empties and you are told “Sold Out! Sorry you missed it!”

Today was the trial run, and featured was 100 of the 2GB Apple iPod Nano’s (Silver) on the block. So how did it work out? Well, the deal seemed to be pretty good for the first-time players; the best I could tell, the last purchaser was able to pick up the $149 iPod for around $99.65 before it sold out. (Note: Some of the posts on this page claimed they saw a price around $98.50… I am not sure why there would have been a difference between what they received and what I saw.) As this game gets more popular, I expect the prices won’t get quite so low before the limited stock is gone… especially as the holidays get closer.

In addition to the discrepancy I just mentioned, there seemed to be some other technical difficulties with Jellyfish’s new game, though.

For example, I had the app running on both IE7 and Mozilla Firefox. While my IE7 screen was counting down the price, my Firefox screen was stuck at 0.00% savings. Was this a quirk on my end, or did the Jellyfish testers not make sure this service worked on Firefox? (I had a colleague who was accessing the SOTD screen with IE6, and he also had trouble seeing any movement in the price.) If you participated, I’d be interested in knowing what browser you used, and whether you had any technical difficulties. Please contact me, or comment to this post, and let me know how you fared.

There were also some posts while the game was running that indicated the price on the Buy Now screen was not what it should have been.. the discount may have “zero’ed out” when the player placed the order. Again, feel free to post or write to me with any of your experiences.

Overall, this promotional technique was different and interesting, and has the potential to be emotional uplifting (I got a great deal!) or disappointing (I waited a few seconds too long!). I’ll give Jellyfish an ‘A’ for creativity, but I’ll withhold my grade on the technical aspects until I hear more feedback.

If this high-pressure, test-your-timing, save-money game seems like something you’d like to join sign up for a Jellyfish account and be sure to visit the Jellyfish.com/sotd page every day around 10:00AM.

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