Consumerist's Shopping Game: You Pick The Deals
We've partnered again with Jellyfish's Smack Deal of the Day to offer our readers a chance at up to 80% off on products of their choice.
Jellyfish's Smack Deal of the Day is a reverse auction: as time passes, price drops. The game is to buy the product at the lowest price possible. Towards the end it can get as low as 80% off. The trick is that you don't know how many units are in stock, so if you wait too long... you lose out. There's side games and a real-time chat too. Beats working!
At checkout, players pay full price, but receive the cash back via check or Paypal within 60 days. People seemed to have fun last time around.
Here's where you come in. What would you like to get a smackdeal on?
We'll take your suggestions and poll the results. The top picks get smackdealed at on Thursday 6/28 at 3pm Eastern .
Let us know your dream products in the comments.
Bookmark this: Consumerist Smackdeal Countdown
(On the backend, Jellyfish isn't paying us. We just thought it would be a cool and fun thing for y'all.) — BEN POPKEN
This is a test contextual ad for the SHOPPING category. It should appear on all SHOPPING entries, unless the subcategory has its own ad.
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Comments:
@Hawkins - Only anecdotal evidence, but I bought something during one of these and ended up having to do a chargeback because the company the item was from charged my card and never sent me the item, never returned emails, could not answer my concerns on the phone - said they would call me back within an hour, they didnt, called again and said if i didnt hear back by the end of the day i would do a chargeback (this was over 6 weeks since my card was charged) - they never called back.
Basically Jellyfish is an "aggregator" or sorts, selling products from various retailers - so probably depends on who the retailer is for the product, but in my case I got burned and it would put me off future participation...
Sounds great, but it's a huge time sink. I can read an entire day's worth of Consumerist posts and comments in a few minutes, but A/V is real-time. That's why I don't do podcasts, or whatever the "cast du jour" is. The same text I can read in 10 minutes takes an hour to listen to. Is there some way to get these deals without taking an hour off work to watch talking heads?
The website looks fun, but like other people I'm concerned with waiting up to 60 days to get my money back. On my credit card 60 days is the time limit I have to do a chargeback, so I would be worried about not getting the money back and being stuck paying full price.
I think Paypal has some consumer protection policies, does anyone know how those will apply?
@mishy: The 60-day chargeback limit is the reason you have to wait for the cash. Otherwise, it would be easy to defraud jellyfish by doing chargebacks for all purchases.
I signed up for jellyfish when it was first introduced on the consumerist, and I've made purchases and gotten money back. This really isn't a scam, and you will get your money.
The reason for the waiting period is the return time. As mentioned above, jellyfish is an aggregator, you buy through a different site. The rebate, however, comes from jellyfish itself and not the store you bought it from (I believe their business model runs on 'rebates' from ad revenue). So, the waiting period is to prevent you from buying, returning and getting money for free. Not ideal by any means, but I've never heard anybody complain about not getting money back.
As a word of caution for anybody wanting buy anything, however, 80% isn't realistic for most items. There are a lot of jellyfish users who double as ebay sellers, so many popular items will fall under the '30%' ish category - cheaper than ebay, but not drastically cheaper. Expect about a 25% cashback on a Nikon D40 before ebayers buy it for resale.
Is this some sort of test, to see if Ive been paying attention to how to properly identify a scam?
Lets see... posting an ad, and swearing you havent been paid (why on earth would you do that?)
Lots of gimmicks
Price not publicly posted
Promises a "refund" if I just pay everything now....
Its presented as a "game"
YEP! its a scam! do I win?
I am a regular on Jellyfish, I love it. But your statement is incorrect about 80%. We have had multiple items go at 100% off, at least 3. No one wanted to buy them, but bought them for shipping price only. This usually doesn't happen during the smack show though, only during 24/7.
It's fun kids, it's legit, and tell them The Reviewer sent you, I mean besides The Consumerist.
I see from the screenshot that they copyrighted the phrase "talk'n smack," which is a GOOD thing, because you don't need other people making contractions of the phrase "talk and smack."
...OH, it's supposed to be "talkin' smack"? Well, that makes more sense!
I weep for apostrophe use the world over.
@Firemedic510: Sorry to haer that. I've forwarded your comment on to Jellyfish and they are contacting the merchant to look into this.
@Ben Popken: Smackdeal has said that the issues commenters complained about concern a merchant they're no longer working with and they're going to give the people the same dollar amount of cash back off any other item on Jellyfish.com.

















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