Slice, a company best known to consumers for its mobile shopping assistant that helps you find the best deals, track packages, organize your receipts, and more, is out today with a new service aimed at helping online shoppers save. Called Slice Watch, its latest app lives in your web browser instead, allowing you to track price drops on items you find online.
The idea is something akin to a smarter “wish list” of sorts.
While we often save the items we’re considering purchasing, with plans to keep an eye on them for future sales or discounts, many times we simply add them to an online wish list or bookmark them, and then promptly forget they exist.
Slice Watch solves this problem by tracking price drops for you.
The extension works across a number of the major online sites, including Amazon, Best Buy, Target, Walmart, Nordstrom, Macy’s, REI, Anthropologie, Newegg.com, Staples, Walgreens, Sephora, and others. After you add Slice Watch to your Chrome web browser, the icon will light up teal if you’re on a supported site.
Then, when you see a product you want to buy, you just click the button. A pop-up window appears, allowing you to add the item to your Slice Shopping List.
Slice Watch when then watch the item on your behalf, and email you if the price ever drops.
The company already uses this price-watching technology in its mobile app, and claims it saves consumers hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, with the average shopper saving around $30 monthly.
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The technology arrives at a time when Amazon has stopped offering price match refunds on anything but TVs – a move prompted by a growing number of startups, like Earny and Paribus, which had helped to automate refund requests for online shoppers. Amazon stated it changed its policy for consumer’s own protection – reminding customers not to share their Amazon credentials with third-parties for security’s sake.
But in reality, shoppers were turning to services like this because of the nature of online shopping and the dynamic price changes used by major e-commerce stores. Unlike physical, brick-and-mortar retailers, online prices can fluctuate much more often. In fact, Amazon changes its prices on millions of items every day. That means it’s harder than ever for consumers to find the best deal through manual price tracking.
Of course, be aware that by using Slice Watch, you’re agreeing to provide data back to the company for use in its retail intelligence service. Slice’s main business, after all, is not its consumer-facing apps, but its sizable e-commerce data set which includes purchase data and other retail insights directly from shoppers – not surveys or panels.
In the case of Slice Watch, the company says it tracks the sites you visit, search queries about products on the sites, price and product info, personal info like name and email when you register online, information from social sites like Facebook, and even information about websites you view when you’re not using Slice Watch, among other things. If that’s too intrusive for your tastes, Slice is not the app for you. However, if you’ve long ago acquiesced to the fact that your online world filled with free and useful services is powered by your willingness to share your personal data, well…Slice’s price drop watching extension it is.
Slice Watch is available here on the Chrome Web Store.