Online shopping can be both a convenient and exhaustive experience for consumers trying to hunt down bargains, especially during the holidays when email inboxes are inundated with companies promising they have the best deals and the best products.
While online retail has opened many new doors for both companies and consumers, PriceWaiter co-founders and local entrepreneurs Stephen Culp and Andrew Scarbrough announced this fall that it was time for an upgrade with their launch of the PriceWaiter browser extension that allows shoppers to make an offer and get the best deal without having to search through an inbox of coupons.
Check it out
To download PriceWaiter for free, visit pricewaiter.com.
If you have downloaded the PriceWaiter browser extension that launched this fall then when you land on a page with a product where PriceWaiter can negotiate a better deal, a "Make an Offer" banner automatically appears. You can then enter your offer for the item and PriceWaiter begins negotiating in real time. Making an offer does not commit consumers to a purchase and retail partners can either accept an offer or counter."PriceWaiter is the company that we really think could be the next PayPal just by the nature of the model," said Culp, a Chattanooga entrepreneur who is also co-founder of Smart Furniture, Delegator, ProDiligence, Chattanooga Renaissance Funds I & II and the nonprofit ventures Causeway and CF Smackdown.
This is how it works: Say you are searching for a new smart TV. If you have downloaded the PriceWaiter browser extension that launched this fall then when you land on a page with a product where PriceWaiter can negotiate a better deal, a "Make an Offer" banner automatically appears. You can then enter your offer for the item and PriceWaiter begins negotiating in real time. Making an offer does not commit consumers to a purchase and retail partners can either accept an offer or counter.
PriceWaiter doesn't have every product yet, and a consumer could shop around online without seeing the PriceWaiter banner at all. Culp said they have millions of products though and they continue to add tens of thousands each day. Recently, they added more than 250,000 products in one week, including electronics, baby products and watches.
Culp has experience when it comes to coupling the old with the new. His first venture, Smart Furniture, launched in his professor's garage in the mid-1990s while he was studying law at Stanford University. Calling it "Legos for adults," Culp said he took something people had always bought and will continue to buy and created one of the first e-commerce web tools for people to design their own furniture.
A handful of companies later, Culp and Scarbrough, who is the COO of PriceWaiter, sat in the conference room of their new third-floor office on Cherry Street in the downtown Innovation District and explained how the newly launched browser extension benefits both sides of a transaction.
"Our goal is to make free markets freer and make buying and selling easier," Culp said.
There are already browser extensions out there that can help consumers save money when shopping online such as "Honey," which searches the web for any coupons available on certain products and sites. But PriceWaiter brings back the old-fashioned bargaining methods of making an offer to PriceWaiter retail partners who can find some wiggle room in their price in order to beat out a competitor. They are hoping it can one day become a household name, like the digital wallets PayPal or Venmo.
As Culp and Scarbrough phrase it, the new tool allows shoppers to not be "beholden" to manufactured holidays that promise better deals on certain products.
"You don't have to wait for Black Friday or Cyber Monday or feel bad that you missed it," Scarbrough said.
PriceWaiter is actually a five-year-old company that Culp and Scarbrough co-founded in 2013, and it has negotiated better prices on over $50 million in purchases, Scarbrough said. For the past five years, it was only available as software for their retail partners to use and consumers could only make an offer if they were shopping on retail partner sites. The new browser extension for consumers is available on Mozilla and Google Chrome browsers currently, but extensions for Safari and Edge will be coming in 2019.
The co-founders said they also hope to roll out another phase of the online bargaining tool next year with some funding from local Chattanoogans. Currently, they have nine full-time employees in Chattanooga and on the West Coast.
"Our goal is to create something here that satisfies all sides of a transaction," Culp said. "We want to ultimately be your universal shopping tool."
Contact staff writer Allison Shirk Collins at ashirk@timesfreepress.com, @AllisonSCollins or 423-757-6651.