This is February 2010 revision of the Popular Price Comparison web sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.

The change in rating shows the difference compared to January results. The list has a total of 32 web sites which is one less than the last month (bestwebbuys.com is out after being the worst site for 3 months in a row). There are 18 more sites in my database that don’t meet Alexa Rank < 100,000 requirement. The average price comparison site has lost (10.61%) this month

The best performer this month is again sortprice.com (3.13%) followed by like.com with a gain of (1.25%). The worst performer this month is dealighted.com with a loss of (-65.85%) followed by (again) shoplocal.com (-43.05%). Please enjoy the complete list below.

#	Web Site	Alexa Rank		Page Rank		Online Since
1	google.com/products	1		8		11-Sep-2001
2	shopping.yahoo.com	4	(-33.33%)	8		18-Jan-1995
3	bing.com/shopping	5		6		22-May-2008
4	shopping.aol.com	43	(-4.88%)	7		22-Jun-1995
5	shopper.cnet.com (info)	66	(-3.13%)	8		05-Jul-1996
6	nextag.com	495	(-1.02%)	7		15-Oct-1998
7	shopping.com	604	(-7.28%)	7		03-Jul-1997
8 (1)	bizrate.com	892	(-10.53%)	7		24-Apr-1996
9 (1)	shoplocal.com	1143	(-43.05%)	7		24-Sep-1998
10	pricegrabber.com (info)	1490	(-9.88%)	7		10-Mar-1999
11	pronto.com	1605	(0.86%)	8		01-Jan-2006
12	thefind.com (info)	1807	(-7.24%)	6		19-Oct-2006
13	shopzilla.com	1880	(-10.91%)	6		04-Jul-2002
14	smarter.com	1920	(-3.39%)	6		28-Apr-1998
15	epinions.com	1991	(-5.01%)	7		12-Feb-1999
16	dealtime.com	2639	(-4.72%)	6		07-Oct-1998
17	become.com	2935	(-10.55%)	6		20-Jan-2004
18	retrevo.com	3813	(-10.04%)	6		10-May-2006
19	shopwiki.com	4520	(-3.5%)	5		15-Dec-2004
20 (1)	pricerunner.com	5938	(-5.45%)	6		19-May-1999
21 (1)	ebates.com	7006	(-30.49%)	6		29-Dec-1998
22	dealio.com	9953	(-15.6%)	5		08-Sep-2004
23	mysimon.com	11005	(-18.69%)	9		15-Apr-1998
24 (1)	like.com	12355	(1.25%)	6		22-Feb-1995
25 (1)	dealighted.com (info)	17985	(-65.85%)	5		09-Oct-2006
26	pricewatch.com	21164	(-6.18%)	6		26-Sep-1995
27	calibex.com	22001	(-2.94%)	5		02-Oct-2000
28	bottomdollar.com	29413	(-21.41%)	7	(7)	04-Jul-1997
29	hawkee.com	34003	(0.26%)	5		02-Jan-1997
30	sortprice.com	38901	(3.13%)	5		15-Jan-2004
31 (1)	streetprices.com	42739	(-1.18%)	5		16-Oct-1997
32 (1)	pricescan.com	43872	(-8.62%)	6		03-Sep-1997

Of course it is not completely free, there is a trick. Starbucks kicks off eight weeks of exploration with a different bold coffee each week. If your coffee shop participates in this promotion you have a chance of pocketing 1 lb whole bean coffee at the end of the 8 weeks. Here are the rules:

• Ask for a Coffee Journey Passport card to track your weekly bold coffee experience. Cards are available the first week, through 3/14/10.
• Sample a tall 12-oz bold coffee each week ($1.50) and get a sticker.
• Customers who collect 8 stickers (one per week) through May 3 will receive a free 1-lb. whole bean bold coffee of their choice.

Go to starbucks.com/bold for more details.

Source: Starbucks Invites Customers on a Bold Coffee Journey (via Buxr)

This is February 2010 revision of the Popular Deal Sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.

The change in rating shows the difference compared to January results and includes all deal sites from my database that meet Alexa Rank < 100,000 requirement. A total of 38 sites have made it this month which is 2 less than the last month

The average deal site lost 14.73% in Alexa rank this month. The top gainer this month is bargaineering.com (8.9%). The top loser is gottadeal.com (-206.97%) which had a sharp drop in rating that can be explained by the Christmas holiday shopping moving out of the 3 months moving average that Alexa is tracking (the same sharp drop was in February last year). I missed dealcatcher last month so the results are a bit skewed. For whatever they are worth, please enjoy them below.

#	Web Site	Alexa Rank		Page Rank		Online Since
1	slickdeals.net (info)	579	(-12.21%)	6		10-Nov-1999
2	fatwallet.com (info)	1481	(-17.35%)	7		29-Nov-1999
3	dealnews.com (info)	3055	(-21.47%)	6		20-Jan-1999
4 (1)	dealspl.us (info)	3610	(-6.08%)	5		15-May-2006
5 (1)	techbargains.com (info)	3816	(-20.23%)	6		03-May-1999
6	anandtech.com	4950	(-0.94%)	6		24-Aug-1997
7	deals2buy.com (info)	7089	(-23.07%)	5		15-Nov-2002
8	dealtaker.com (info)	7178	(-22.85%)	7		08-Feb-2004
9	dealsea.com	8880	(-9.41%)	5		27-Jun-2001
10	bensbargains.net	10052	(-12.61%)	5		21-Mar-2000
11 (n/a)	dealcatcher.com	11057	(n/a)	6		28-Jul-1999
12 (1)	resellerratings.com (info)	11067	(-2.56%)	5		18-Jun-1998
13 (1)	dealigg.com (info)	11314	(-9.55%)	3		04-Sep-2006
14 (3)	cheapstingybargains.com	11632	(-15.34%)	6		20-Jan-2005
15 (1)	logicbuy.com	21342	(-7.03%)	4		13-Nov-2003
16 (3)	couponalbum.com	22167	(-4.99%)	5		18-Jan-2006
17	spoofee.com	23457	(-15.27%)	4		31-Dec-2000
18 (4)	judysbook.com	23844	(3.76%)	5		11-Aug-2003
19 (4)	xpbargains.com	23914	(-20.74%)	5		29-Nov-2001
20 (1)	deals.com (info)	26052	(-6.5%)	4		28-Feb-1995
21 (3)	bargaineering.com	27162	(8.9%)	5		01-Dec-2004
22 (2)	edealinfo.com	28590	(-25.3%)	4		12-Dec-2000
23	bradsdeals.com	30986	(-10.89%)	5		29-Jun-2005
24 (2)	webbyplanet.com	32370	(3.48%)	4		09-Feb-2006
25	dealofday.com	33263	(-3.28%)	6		30-Aug-1999
26 (8)	dealsofamerica.com	34066	(-65.11%)	5		06-Sep-2003
27 (13)	gottadeal.com	34592	(-206.97%)	5		27-Jan-2003
28 (1)	bargainist.com (info)	48053	(-17.98%)	3		21-Nov-2006
29	redtagdeals.com	57455	(-8.92%)	3		08-May-2002
30 (2)	buxr.com	57671	(-19.62%)	4		04-Dec-2007
31	passwird.com	73738	(-13.26%)	4		28-Aug-2001
32 (2)	dailyedeals.com	79389	(-5.93%)	4		18-Feb-2000
33 (2)	shopping-bargains.com	82984	(-7.95%)	4		20-Feb-1999
34 (4)	a2zdeals.com	86096	(-2.12%)	3		05-Aug-1999
35 (1)	froobi.com	87204	(-10.73%)	3		01-Jun-2008
36 (3)	ableshoppers.com	90549	(-21.72%)	4		08-Oct-2000
37 (2)	gotapex.com	94599	(-4.43%)	4		29-Apr-1999
38 (1)	dealslist.com	99283	(-23.16%)	4		18-Jul-2000

The site relies on a number of dedicated toolbars users who feed the RetailMeNot database with enormous quantity of coupon codes that they stumble upon. This creates volume which in turn creates buzz and links. Links help RetailMeNot rank for coupon related terms on Google which in turn brings people to the website and drives the Alexa chart up, not to mention all the revenue that comes alone.

It there a better way?

Technology junkies may still be debating if Twitter as a company has a sustainable business model but some of the businesses who pipe the data that Twitter offers freely through its API seem to have no problem with figuring out how to make money. One of them is CouponFollow, a coupon code aggregator I stumbled upon when examining website leads to one of my projects.

So what is CouponFollow? Are you familiar with StockTwits? The service sifts through the tweets and picks those that mention company stock symbols. CouponFollow is just like it but instead it picks tweets that mention coupon codes and sorts them by the store that offers the discount. How is it doing it? By searching for keywords like ‘coupon’, ‘voucher’ and analyzing the outbound link that comes with the tweet. So simple and so clever!

It’s the numbers game

The website launched October 7, 2009 and the November 30 press release mentions 150,000 tweets and 39,000 coupon codes analyzed. It is March 3, 2010 now and the sidebar shows 369,699 tweets and 93,645 codes which means CouponFollow has added around 55,000 coupon codes in just 3 months! This is the kind of volume that I am pretty sure even the coupon leader RetailMeNot cannot match.

RetailMeNot relies on a group of toolbars users to get the coupons. Twitter has a much broader number of coupon junkies and guess what, they are eager to share them with the world! Effectively analyzing and organizing this data is all that it takes to beat RetailMeNot at its own game.

What about that business model?

If you look carefully at the tweets that CouponFollow rolls for you, they all are missing that outbound link. That is right, the link is replaced with a coupon code looking flash overlay clicking which is supposed to copy the code into clipboard and redirect to the source. Does it remind you something? Yes, this is how most coupon sites including RetailMeNot organize the coupon pages!

I have not taken time to analyze what CouponFollow does with the links but I did encounter pages like this when clicking on some of them (which is an expired page at Commission Junction, a popular affiliate network) so it is quite possible that CouponFollow stuffs some of their own affiliate cookies into those links.

Update 03/16: Marc Mezzacca of CouponFollow.com emailed me to inform that his company is not engaged in “cookie stuffing” or “link stuffing” activities.

Is this legal? Since CouponFollow doesn’t own the tweets can it still modify them to earn a commission? I am not a legal expert and so will not even try to guess but there is something shady about doing business this way. I built an aggregator website myself and believe me I had to go through all the intricacies running a website like this implies. Modifying data you don’t own is not a very smart business decision.

The discount in parenthesis is what you will get if you use Amazon Subscribe & Save program. If you like these Amazon coupons, I also recommend you to check out these Amazon discount codes. The best part is that these codes don’t have an expiration date!

Amazon coupon codes for March 2010

This is definitely a step down from the approach the team took originally and I can only wonder why they decided to abandon it. I sent an email via the contact form and will update this post if I hear anything back.

By the way, the old price comparison part of the site is still alive however it is completely outsourced to another provider, a common practice among price comparison sites - the product feed and all the links redirect via Bizrate. Interestingly there is no way to get there from the front page. You have to click “About Us” or “Contact Us” on the button (which is also a trick since the page keeps loading content as you scroll down) and then search any product using the search box at the top right. You will get a page like this (I searched for laptop).

The change in rating shows the difference compared to December results. This list currently has 34 sites - two more than in December. One of the sites (deallocker.com) was mistakenly excluded last month since Alexa didn’t properly return the rank. On average the coupon sites have gained (3.86%) in January.

The best performer is flamingoworld.com (25.65%), which also goes up by 2 positions, and the worst result comes from couponwinner.com (-16.92%) which also goes down by 6 positions. Enjoy the complete list below!

#	Web Site	Alexa Rank		Page Rank		Online Since
1	retailmenot.com (info)	826	(3.28%)	6		27-Oct-2006
2	coupons.com	1917	(-0.68%)	6	(-1)	07-Sep-1994
3	eversave.com	2163	(-0.23%)	4		08-Apr-1999
4	coolsavings.com	3945	(-9.01%)	6		03-Jun-1996
5	couponcabin.com	5692	(6.3%)	6		27-Feb-2003
6	couponmountain.com	6887	(-12.2%)	6		05-May-2001
7 (1)	tjoos.com	7998	(11.58%)	4		16-Jun-2007
8 (1)	savings.com	8128	(-0.64%)	6		20-Apr-1995
9	mycoupons.com	13609	(5.75%)	6		16-Feb-1999
10 (1)	couponcodes4u.com	14000	(13.17%)	5		01-Aug-2007
11 (1)	coupons.smartsource.com	14795	(2.5%)	6		27-Apr-1995
12 (2)	couponmom.com	21233	(12.13%)	6		25-Jun-2002
13	8coupons.com	22313	(1.47%)	5		11-Jun-2006
14 (2)	hotcouponworld.com	22545	(-3.79%)	4		15-Jun-2006
15	ultimatecoupons.com	24525	(3.13%)	4		02-Jul-2001
16	offers.com	29648	(-0.84%)	6		24-Feb-1996
17	deallocker.com	32573	(n/a)	4		24-Mar-2007
18 (1)	wow-coupons.com	33527	(3.83%)	4		26-Nov-2003
19 (1)	webbyplanet.com	33857	(2.7%)	4		09-Feb-2006
20	valpak.com	35811	(3.35%)	6		22-Jun-1994
21	couponcode.com	37222	(-0.05%)	5		24-Feb-2002
22	fabuloussavings.com	37378	(0.93%)	5		27-Jan-1999
23 (6)	couponwinner.com	39432	(-16.92%)	5		30-Jan-2006
24 (1)	couponchief.com	40013	(-0.98%)	5		15-Jan-2005
25 (1)	couponseven.com	48430	(0.33%)	3		23-May-2006
26 (1)	thegrocerygame.com	54299	(2.74%)	5		28-Aug-2001
27 (2)	flamingoworld.com	60428	(25.65%)	4		19-May-1999
28 (2)	couponshare.com	74701	(-6.71%)	3		21-Jan-2002
29 (2)	shopping-bargains.com	77691	(-6.19%)	4		20-Feb-1999
30 (2)	currentcodes.com	79487	(-6.74%)	6		27-Dec-2000
31 (1)	gogoshopper.com	87191	(-5.76%)	5		16-Dec-1999
32 (1)	couponheaven.com	88399	(-3.26%)	3		28-Sep-2003
33 (1)	cellfire.com	95745	(1.78%)	5		23-Jun-2004
34	couponsurfer.com	97157	(5.43%)	5		11-Feb-1998

This is January 2010 revision of the Popular Price Comparison web sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.

The change in rating shows the difference compared to December results. The list has a total of 33 web sites which is the same number as the last month. There are 17 more sites in my database that don’t meet Alexa Rank < 100,000 requirement (one less because I just removed Boodle). The average price comparison site has lost (1.51%) this month

The best performer this month is again mysimon.com (18.09%) followed by streetprices.com with a gain of (16.92%). The worst performer this month is (for a third month in a row) bestwebbuys.com with a loss of (-30.08%) followed by shoplocal.com (-11.28%). Please enjoy the complete list below.

#	Web Site	Alexa Rank		Page Rank		Online Since
1	google.com/products	1		8		11-Sep-2001
2	shopping.yahoo.com	3		8		18-Jan-1995
3	bing.com/shopping	5		6		22-May-2008
4	shopping.aol.com	41		7		22-Jun-1995
5	shopper.cnet.com (info)	64		8		05-Jul-1996
6	nextag.com	490	(2.39%)	7		15-Oct-1998
7	shopping.com	563	(-6.83%)	7		03-Jul-1997
8	shoplocal.com	799	(-11.28%)	7		24-Sep-1998
9	bizrate.com	807	(-9.65%)	7		24-Apr-1996
10	pricegrabber.com (info)	1356	(-1.19%)	7		10-Mar-1999
11 (2)	pronto.com	1619	(4.14%)	8		01-Jan-2006
12	thefind.com (info)	1685	(-5.05%)	6		19-Oct-2006
13 (2)	shopzilla.com	1695	(-7.48%)	6		04-Jul-2002
14	smarter.com	1857	(-4.15%)	6		28-Apr-1998
15	epinions.com	1896	(-0.26%)	7		12-Feb-1999
16	dealtime.com	2520	(0.08%)	6		07-Oct-1998
17	become.com	2655	(-3.55%)	6		20-Jan-2004
18	retrevo.com	3465	(-1.08%)	6		10-May-2006
19	shopwiki.com	4367		5		15-Dec-2004
20	ebates.com	5369	(0.56%)	6		29-Dec-1998
21	pricerunner.com	5631	(-0.18%)	6		19-May-1999
22	dealio.com	8610	(-3.7%)	5		08-Sep-2004
23 (1)	mysimon.com	9272	(18.09%)	9		15-Apr-1998
24 (1)	dealighted.com (info)	10844	(-6.66%)	5		09-Oct-2006
25	like.com	12511	(4.06%)	6		22-Feb-1995
26	pricewatch.com	19932	(-1.48%)	6		26-Sep-1995
27	calibex.com	21372	(-2.86%)	5		02-Oct-2000
28	bottomdollar.com	24226	(-2.23%)	0		04-Jul-1997
29	hawkee.com	34093	(2.09%)	5	(1)	02-Jan-1997
30 (1)	sortprice.com	40156	(3.45%)	5		15-Jan-2004
31 (1)	pricescan.com	40390	(-3.82%)	6		03-Sep-1997
32	streetprices.com	42240	(16.92%)	5		16-Oct-1997
33	bestwebbuys.com	89282	(-30.08%)	5		06-Jan-1998

Source: $100 Bonus with a new Checking account at Bank of America (at Buxr)