Right off the bat I should admit that I don’t particularly like their choice of domain. It’s not catchy, it’s not a type-in domain, and it does not seem very relevant to their market. I hope I’m not wrong on this and that their SEO guys will try to make up for it, but it’s a gut feeling I can’t seem to shake off.

Ugenie.com serves a dual purpose. On one hand it’s a tool to search for bargains; on the other it tries to present the user with potential bundles to get instead of just an individual product. Its first purpose sounds secondary, since there are many sites who already do this – so we’re led to believe that its real focus are bundles and being able to save is just a natural extension of that service.

Naik’s blog takes a rather positive take on this product, calling it a “slick product [...] that gets consumers 75% of the way to online shopping nirvana”. It also points to the website’s greatest challenge of tying into 3rd party vendors so deeply that the entire purchase can be automated from ugenie. If you ask me, it won’t happen any time soon – there’s no reason why a true middle-man would want to yield his/her full engine to this type of a meta-site.

Postbuble completely dismisses this product, saying that “unfortunately, a lot of [the deals you find] aren’t at the same store, increasing the amount of money you’ll pay on shipping as well as the time to order your stuff.” This is certainly true as in fact the core of ugenie is data scraping, which I believe it does quite well. Now, this can result in higher shipping, but does not have to.

My take is as follows – ignore the budling feature for now until they polish up their services – combined, discounted shipping, additional deals served up to them as top affiliates (as that’s what they really are in the end); don’t really count on the bundling features to be developed any time soon. Also, categories are for the time being very limited, so that, too, requires some serious work. Just use it as a well-developed deal site. The engine is rather fast; it certainly is quite sleek, and the results delivered really do beat the usual prices found manually on the net.

I ran a search for three random products:

1. a book, From Bruised Fell – Listed Price $7.00 + s/h – ugenie’s best price $1.45 (+ 3.25 s/h).
2. a movie, Matrix – Listed Price $24.95 +s/h – ugenie’s best price $5.91 (+ 2.59 s/h) [new item, used was cheaper].
3. a game, World of Warcraft – Listed Price $39.95 + s/h – ugenie’s best price $19.99 (+ 2.98 s/h – 1.99 coupon) [used item was under $5.00!

It seems to me that in each case I received extremely substantial savings, with both new and used options, with a coupon integrated when available, and all three searches took me under two minutes. I’d say from that perspective, this was definitely worth my time.

My only peeve is their focus on US markets only. While that is fine, they are losing a lot of potential clients, considering that a lot of international companies release public APIs as well. On top of that, I’ve checked entry pages from US, Canada, UK, and France and it’s always the same page – no IP-based traffic, no ‘oops’ page, no redirection to a ‘work in progress’.

My brief conclusion is that while ugenie is definitely not what it purports to be (at least not yet), it most certainly is a speedy alternative to looking for deals manually.