Paribus (YC S15) Gets You Money Back When Stuff You've Bought Goes on Sale
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
I was very uneasy about granting email access, but I did anyway. Turns out that they have trouble scanning my emails for Amazon receipts, so they recommend giving them my Amazon username and password.
No way I would ever do that. I can revoke gmail oauth access (which I did), but giving you my Amazon password also grants you access to my AWS account (not really because of 2-factor, but still).
Why would I trust them to correctly store & encrypt such sensitive data, just to save a few bucks on Amazon purchases. Not worth it for me.
This product looks cool, but I'm not seeing past the privacy issues right now.
Also, you can set up a secondary account and auto-forward emails relatively quickly to a forwarding address linked to Paribus. On Gmail:
1- Go to filters and start creating a new filter: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/filters 2- In the from field, type: amazon.com OR bestbuy.com OR staples.com OR macys.com etc. with all the retailers for which you want to track receipts 3- Click "create a filter with this search" 4- Click "Forward it to" and add your forwarding address.
You should be all set after that (although you will have to change your filter if you want to add the new retailers as we add more)
Hope this helps. We'll add to the FAQ :)
Oh, this is interesting, and should get around most of the privacy concerns. One question: how do you get the money back from the retailer? I had assumed that Paribus sent an email from the account, but that won't actually work if my email is zck@example.com and I give you access to zck-shopping@example.com. If you email Amazon from zck-shopping@example.com, would they refund zck@example.com? Or do you send me an email saying something like "Amazon dropped prices on $PRODUCT_X, contact them here<link> to get a refund"?
My email is zkanfer@gmail.com.
My concern is that if I take margin away from Amazon, and a take up a bunch of their CS time using Paribus, Amazon will classify me as a customer they would rather not have. And then, say, cancel my account if I end up returning bunch of stuff later, as they are rumored to do.
So for Amazon, are price drop claims Amazon's official policy, or something that their CS allowed to do to appease customers? What kind of Amazon price drops qualify for refund?
Also, if setting up a separate account to forward receipts to, the email will be different than one Amazon has for me. Is this a problem for your automated emails going from that account?