Saving money online can often be just as good as making money online. However, finding the best bargains online can often mean spending quite a bit of time using a search engine before you make your purchase. While online products are usually cheaper than in offline stores and the variety on offer is second to none, I sometimes find the downside of online shopping is that there can often be too much on offer and it can be a daunting task to find the best deals. Hence, I’m a big fan of sites that attempt to take the hard work out of searching for the best deals by combining all the great deals in one place. Dealigg is a site that attempts to do this in a rather unique way and they ordered a ReviewMe review to help grow their bargain-hunting community.Their deals are really diggable

Dealigg is what happens when Digg’s user-voted publishing style meets the world of online shopping. It’s essentially a very web2.0 community run site where the best bargains online are submitted by the members and subsequently voted on by other members with regard to how “hot” the deals are. The best and most popular deals make the front page and get top spot in the product category listings. They’re lucky they didn’t hire me to design their logo as it definitely would’ve included the way too corny tagline, “Web2.0 shopping at Web1.0 prices”.With the deals being user-submitted, there is quite a variety of bargains on offer – although being an online community most of the products are of the “gadgety” electronic nature (TVs, Cameras, Laptops, etc.). What I really like about the user-submitted part of it is that you can get some doubling up of deals on products which enables you to compare different product deals from different stores. For example, after doing a search under ‘iPod’, I was able to find that Amazon is offering the $79 iPod shuffle for $73.97 and displayed directly next to this deal was another deal telling me that Target’s online store had it on offer for $67.50. Perhaps the Target deal was a little newer as it strangely didn’t have as many votes as the Amazon deal.

Being user submitted also means that the deals are updated 24×7 and an interesting feature of the Dealigg site is the ability to view the product’s price history over time. I found knowing that a product’s price has fallen over time and being able to see how much it has changed reassured me that I was getting a good deal. A bit of a “hey, six months ago this cost almost double” factor entered my thinking.

They even have free stuff

The page that I was immediately attracted to on the site was their ‘freebie’ category that lists products that are going for either next to nothing or are completely free. Naturally, this section got a little less ‘gadgety’ – no plasma TVs in this section – but they still had some pretty decent offers that wouldn’t be ignored. A lot of the products were only free through the use of coupon codes or free after rebate but there were also a few deals where companies were giving away product samples for free. Products of this nature included some free 3M post-it cards and an Old Spice razor. Great for leaving yourself a note to remind you to shave something!

The Dealigg effect?

Whether you’re into online shopping or not, the site is worth a look purely from a curiosity standpoint to see just how cheap some things are being offered online compared to offline.

Dealigg relies on user-submitted content and as such the site is only as good as the community supporting it. At this point in time the community is still growing and deals only require a minimum of 7 votes to be considered “hot”. A lot of the deals on the front page even had less than 10 votes. This is quite different from the hundreds of votes that a good article can get on Digg and makes me wonder how much Dealigg can be relied upon to provide the “best” deals. If deals only need 7-10 votes to get the front page, there’s probably a lot of room for manipulation – it happens with Digg and considering there’s money involved with Dealigg it’ll probably happen there too.

Furthermore, the user-submitted content also means that a lot of the deals are only coming from the main online stores. Like me, I guess Dealigg’s users don’t like to search around too much either which results in a lot of the deals not coming from ‘hard to find’ sites but from the already known online shopping staples of Amazon, Buy.com and Circuit City. I guess this makes for a bit of a catch-22 in that the site’s target audience is those who don’t like to spend time shopping around online yet these same people are supposed to be searching around for good deals.

Despite these small shortcomings, Dealigg does have the potential to save you quite a bit of money when shopping on the internet. Next time you’re looking to buy a product online, you’d be smart to head over to Dealigg and compare a few of the deals.

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