Guzzle

One of South Africa’s leading pre-shop websites

The Guzzle team loves the work that Jeremy is doing on My Broadband, we especially like his column called “Tech deals this weekend”.

Basically this is what Guzzle does 24/7.  We show consumers, which Major retailer has the best deal on a particular product like a TV or Gaming machine today.

Guzzle is an online destination for researching what’s on sale in stores of South Africa’s major retailers. Guzzle.co.za is a powerful and unique retail search engine that serves ads from catalogues & newspapers.  It’s a pre-shopping search engine that allows consumers to search across retailers’ catalogues and offers before heading into a nearby store.

The site provides bricks and mortar retailers with the opportunity to reach online consumers lost to e-tailers and e-vendors.  We like to think of Guzzle as a bridge between the offline catalogue and online world.

We do this by uploading about 20 000 new specials each week, which are featured in catalogue’s that Major Retailers normally insert into local newspapers.

Each product listed on the catalogue, is then uploaded individually so that you can easily compare prices between retailers, without being swamped by catalogues.

Guzzle differs from general price comparison sites, because we focus on products that are currently on Special from Major Retailers. No other website in SA, allows customers to compare products on promotion from all the major retailers. We only show items that are presently on promotion, with a start and end date.

Our users have two modes, passive mode where you just browse through catalogues looking for deals, just like reading through a magazine, and active search mode.

For a user in active search mode, here are a list of the helpful features that make shopping easier for you:

• You can have the searches come up as location based, that way it shows which stores are nearest to you.
• Receive alerts for a particular retailer when a new catalogue is loaded.
• If an item is being promoted, you can receive an alert about it.
• And, my favorite part of all, it includes the retailer’s information, such as location of the store, contact details for the business, and the hours it opens and closes!

This way you don’t miss out on the something you covet.

There are plans to create historical product price charts making it easy to see which retailers are “charging too much for items over time”. Similarly, Guzzle intends creating a virtual basket of goods, much like the consumer price index model, and tracking those items’ combined costs across retailers over time.

Our traffic is doubling every 3 months. Guzzle also plans to offer a mobile app soon.

Guzzle is getting close to its goal of becoming SA’s number one pre-purchase website, a bargain hunters heaven.