Here’s a crazy simple idea that someone can build over a weekend.
A Web Service with a browser extension where anyone visiting a webpage (page, not the site) would be able to chat with other visitors of the same page in realtime.
Where/Why it would be useful?
There are so many E-Commerce websites and every site is giving away so many discounts especially for the festival period. But not all discounts are great.
There have been numerous complaints about some sites hiking the prices and then giving discounts and other instances where even the discounted prices doesn’t match the prices of the same product in other sites without the sale.
Now imagine you visit an exciting deal or sale for a product and your fingers are itching to click the big yellow “Buy Now” button. But you want to make sure that you are getting the best deal. There are a few extensions or services that already compare the price among all websites and link you to the cheapest one. But they are not foolproof and the collective intelligence of the crowd is any day better than some script scraping websites.
All you have to do is click the small “Chat” box at the bottom and look at the chat history for people discussing about it. If there hasn’t been any old discussion, you can start one and if there are other people live on the same page, they would help you to confirm the best deal.
How would you make money?
Affiliate links. Whoever runs the service, would add the affiliate tags to any links shared in the chat box and would earn a small percentage of the profits.
For eg.: If you are browsing Flipkart’s page to buy a new smartphone or external harddisk, and someone on the chat says, that Amazon has a better deal on the same product and pastes the link. Your affiliate link would be attached to the link and you would earn a little something to atleast run the servers.
There were a few people who did try to build something similar. But I feel they were a bit ahead of the time. E-Commerce looks to be a real nice niche for this idea and with a decent enough possibility to make some passive income.
Of course, E-Commerce is just one of the various uses this service could have. We would only know of the other uses only when the product is pushed out to the wild and actual users use it.
If someone wants to build this, do ping me and I would love to give more inputs and help in building this.