Külist offers price comparison bookmarklet and cash back

Külist is a new service that uses a browser bookmarklet to offer price comparisons across a number of online shopping sites. The service offers cash back for using its affiliate links on select sites, a referral reward program for getting other users into the service and price tracking alerts by email.

Külist is headed by Don Wolfe of San Clemente, California. I think it’s a great way to offer value to incentivize use of a particular company’s affiliate links. I haven’t found any other service that combines all the features that Külist does. It may not be pretty, but I like the way it works.

The service supports price comparisons from item pages in a number of different sites: Google, Froogle, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Become, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, Shopzilla, PriceRunner, Amazon, Buy.com, Bestprices, J&R, and Walmart.

On search results or item pages in any of the above services, you can click on the Külist Prices bookmarklet and see a drop down window at the top of the page showing the price of your item on other sites. Clicking the vendor link in that box enables you to add the item to a watchlist. The watchlists offers price tracking and alerts by email.

The affiliate links provided through Külist give you a cut of the revenue generated through their use, at least through the services that allow this to be done. Unfortunately, Külist says it currently cannot offer cash back from Amazon.com, BestPrices or Walmart. That’s a shame. You get 2% cash back from the vendors that are included in this feature.

Similarly, the system offers two easy ways to earn %1 cash back for purchases made by people you’ve referred to the system. They don’t have to identify you as the person who referred them, which is good. If you email people about the system (no spamming allowed Külist says!) and add Külist in the Bcc field, the email address of the recipient is added to your list of referred friends. You can also put your own Külist affiliate link on your blog and people who click through will generate revenue for you as well. (I have not done that here.) The ways this is implemented are not necessarily transparent, but that’s always an issue with affiliate links.

Külist is more than usable enough now and hopefully implementation will only improve with time. I think it’s a very interesting model.