Service as Fuzzy as its name...
Written: Jun 29 '00
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I discovered imandi.com about four months ago. I wasn't sure what kind of company it was since it had such a peculiar (okay, weird) name and an equally strange logo. (Imandi has to be about the dumbest domain name in the business. It conveys NOTHING.)
I've since learned that it is a shopping service, kind of a reverse-auction merchant, that is modeled to serve as a "business-2-business" and a "business-2-consumer" clearinghouse.
Frankly, what interested me in joining the service was the offer that I would be paid to refer others. Imandi advertises that it will pay members as much as $25,000 if they bring enough new members into its community. At the time, a lot of IPO money and venture capital seemed to fuel these B2B startups and--since they were openly pleading for referrals and offering pretty good bounties--I enrolled.
Regarding the mechanics of its service, I will say that I have tried to obtain bids for certain computer parts I wanted to buy in order to upgrade my PC. (A fairly simple kind of purchase request; nothing complicated.) I did not receive too many offers from merchants wanting to compete for my business. With the exception of one good bid ("good" being defined as a direct answer to my specific request), I received four or five other offers from various merchants who offered products I didn't want or ask for. In essence: if you ask for "Product A," be prepared to see all kinds of bids from people trying to sell you "Product B." By the way: it took two full days to receive bids from Imandi's pool of merchants. Not very fast....
I then tried other online services and websites like BUY.com, MYSIMON.com, and some computer retailers like Computers4Sure. The result: I found a lot of sites that offered what I wanted at much better prices and with greater options for shipping, return guarantees, etc.
It appears that Imandi is trying to reach out to smaller retailers who don't have the financial clout to maintain sophisticated e-commerce websites, or to those small shops that don't have the connections or the wherewithal to advertise on other high traffic B2B and B2C sites.
Imandi is trying to make a name for itself by BUYING brand loyalty. I shouldn't complain because I earned over $250 in Imandi rewards (which was not easy to do). Trouble is, people on the web who are looking to save money are not loyal to anyone except the LOWEST QUALIFIED BIDDER.
Here's my synopsis of the entire Imandi program:
1) Imandi is trying to buy your loyalty. The theory: if they offer you $5 per referral, you will drive visitors to its site.
2) Merchants are only interested in Imandi if millions of visitors start making purchase requests.
3) Once YOU make a purchase request and you find (like I did) that the results come back too slowly and are too far off from what you originally asked for... you probably won't go back to Imandi again.
4) Visitor counts drop; merchants become disenfranchised; money runs out... and Imandi will probably become another DOT-COM casualty.
My Chief complaints with Imandi:
-- You do not know the merchants who are participating in the reverse auctions. The pool of merchants is not advertised, so you don't know where your bids are going to come from. You don't know how many merchants will actually see your bid request, and your bid request is not openly posted for all visitors to respond to.
-- The available bid categories are limited. Links to merchant websites are not provided.
-- Everything about Imandi, including its name, is "fuzzy" and vague. This is a new site, still trying to prove itself, and it doesn't really look like they know what they are doing... they are "learning as they go along."
What I like about Imandi:
-- I made a few bucks off them, but the well has clearly dried up. In my first month of advertising its service, I made $100 easily. The next month, the earnings dropped by a third. The next month, it dropped another 1/3. This latest month, I earned practically nothing. (This tells me that people have lost interest in this kind of company.)
-- It's free and the site is not crammed top-to-bottom, side-to-side with banner ads, so that's kind of nice.
Recommendation: You can try it, but you will probably get better results with more established, better known shopping services like MySimon. Better yet, you may want to consider your local yellow pages. It is easier and faster. This company it too new and does not appear to have everything in place just yet to service the web community like some of the older, more established sites.
Recommended:
No
Review Focus: The buying experience
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Epinions.com ID:
4-1-1
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Member: Tom Carr
Location: Southern California
Reviews written: 1090
Trusted by: 690 members
About Me:
Go U.S.C.!!!
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