Technology can make life easier, but frequently it also makes things more complicated. It is easier to buy things online than going to a store, but one faces a dizzying array of choices. People want quality items at the lowest possible price, but it is hard to figure everything out. Shopping searches return too many results, and Amazon always has thousands of items for every category.
One way to get a smaller subset of lower prices is to check out a deals site like Dealnews or Slickdeal. (Especially around this time of the year.) However, it's hard to know whether the item is good-quality or whether the "deal" is actually such a great price. Dealnews tries to provide some information about the normal pricing of the item, but it still doesn't answer whether the price is a good one. It may be that those earphones are normally $20 and are now $10, but it's not really relevant if I can get better earphones for $5.
It would be pretty useful if a website was able to provide data not just on the price of the item, but on similar items also. If the site could measure in some way the features and quality of an item, it could help users recognize what's a good deal. For example, if the site was able to say that these type of earphones are hard to get for under $15, one would know $10 is a good deal. The hard part for the site would obviously be getting and analyzing the data in a way that allows these comparisons. A site could use various sources, such as Amazon reviews, but it would need to see what's really reliable and gives clear information about a product. If a website could do a good job in this area, it could really help people deal with all complexity of online shopping.
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