Dealoco.com Builds Through Affiliates
About a year ago, five information technology professionals in Dallas thought they could do a better job than a lot of the online shopping sites.
“None of them provided a good search functionality,” says Steve Cospolich, president of Dealoco.com. “If you were looking for a particular product, you typed it in and you were just searching forums. So you wouldn’t get specific product results and it was really hard to search through all the deals.”
So with the help of four friends, Cospolich, an IT security consultant by day, spent the past year developing Dealoco.com, which attempts to find the best deals for consumers from more than 100 merchants of camera, computer products, gaming, phones, electronics, apparel and baby/kid products.
“We have the search capability where you can search by model number, by manufacturer, by store name and by the user that posted the deal,” says Cospolich.
Other capabilities include a custom RSS feed service, product review listings and an advanced search system, he says. The RSS feeds give users the ability to set up deal alerts. For example, whenever a listing for a “Sony plasma TV” gets entered onto the system, a deal will show up on a user’s RSS reader.
So far, Dealoco.com has forged affiliate marketing relationships with such merchants as Circuit City, Amazon.com, Buy.com, Wal-Mart, Newegg, Staples and Tiger Direct, each of which pays Dealoco a small commission on each sale, says Cospolich.
This is Dealoco’s primary revenue source although it is selling a few online ads through Google AdWords and on social networking site Facebook.com, he says.
It’s also relying on word-of-mouth.
Cospolich hopes these efforts will give Dealoco.com 50,000 customers a day over the next year.
