Beat My Price: Treat Your Favourite Foodie to a Gourmet Buffet

As a self-certified foodie, I'm interested in all things food. Whether it's learning how to make a new dish, reading about food or getting my hands dirty, exercising my brain and creating a new recipe. For any occasion, be it my birthday or Christmas, I can be sure that at least half of my gifts will be food related and I wouldn't have it any other way!

One of my new-found favourite hobbies is going on foodie experiences. You know the type: strutting up to a pub or fancy restaurant and learning how to make a signature dish. Or booking on at a top restaurant, tasting the wares and being blown away by today's great chefs. I'm up for either option! So when I heard about Bespoke Offers, the first thing I did was look up all the foodie related offers!

After browsing the extensive list of cheap food deals, I decided to have a go at sourcing my dream trip: a gourmet buffet featuring legendary restaurants from some of the UK's top chefs! What I came up with was an amazing three-meal buffet, featuring food from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay. (Insert fan girl moment!)

You can simply browse Bespoke Offers in the way I've described and it's a perfectly fine offers website. Or you can use the site another way, a much cooler, more exciting way! The new Beat My Price service from Bespoke Offers can secure you the best price possible from a range of products.

This service can help you save loads on toys, films, electronics, video games et cetera. Personally, I've been looking for a good waffle maker. Prices for this particular gadget (like so many other things) varies greatly from shop to shop and it's been doing my head in looking at a million tabs a day on the hunt for the cheapest, best waffle maker. So I put Beat My Price to the test! Check this out:

Hrm waffle makers on a big kitchenwares shop start at £50. I bet Beat My Price can do better!

Egads! Beat My Price returns an error. Not to worry; maybe what I consider to be a big kitchenwares shop, may not be big enough. Let's go a bit bigger.

Oooooh. How many do I want? Let's just stick with one for now.

Now the hard part. Waiting up to 2 days for Beat My Price to work its magic.

Thankfully, it didn't take 2 days to get my quote back from Beat My Price. It didn't even take 20 minutes. Here's what happened next:

Beat My Price is working their price comparison magic!

Oh, no! Looks like I'll be shelling out the big bucks for a waffle maker after all.

Not one to give up easily, I decided to have another go with Beat My Price but this time to be a lot less specific and a lot more generic. What's something I've been wanting to buy? Oh, I know! A new camera! Now that is one competitive market, so let's see how Beat My Price fares:

Camera found on a large retailer's website.

Oh, no! Beat My Price error. Again. *sigh*

Camera scoped out on even larger retailer's website.

And now we wait.

Unfortunately, I never got to find out if Beat My Price could actually beat my price. They emailed me the next day with the results, but I was so busy with work, that I didn't have time to check my emails until a few days later. When I finally did check my email and tried to check my price, I was told that my offer had expired. To be honest, I was pretty upset that after all of the rigmarole needed to get the quote in the first place, that I lost it. Learn from my mistakes, if you use Beat My Price, make sure you use an email address that you check daily!

Pros & Cons of Beat My Price

Pros
+ Beat My Price is extremely easy to use
+ Registration is a cinch; opt for Facebook registration to make it really quick
+ Loads of different services rolled into one: bespoke, tailored offers plus price comparison equals win-win!

Cons
-- Waiting two days for your best price
Beat My Price:
Many customers will receive a response within a shorter time frame.  Most customers will have an offer within 12 hours. Our research has shown though that people are prepared to wait when they know that people are working on their behalf to get them a better deal.
-- Not knowing which websites Beat My Price is reviewing
-- Not knowing if Beat My Price will stick to the brand you've chosen or will just look for all products relevant. (eg. I want an electric waffle maker.)
Beat My Price:
Beat My Price looks for a better price than the one you have found for that particular product you have provided a URL for.
-- Not knowing if Beat My Price will take shipping into effect: is this a global search?
-- Not knowing which websites Beat My Price considers to be big enough retailers makes it difficult to search adequately for a product.

Final Verdict

Although the entire process wasn't as easy and streamlined as I would have preferred, I can't help but to like this service. There's something really lovely about knowing that a team of price hunters are working hard to find the best deal for you, although it does make me wonder if they're just doing Google, Bing and Yahoo searches or if they've got some newfangled amazing price hunting software! Even though the results of my trials with Beat My Price weren't what I was hoping they would be, I'm quite certain it's because I'm probably being too specific or not using the service as succinctly as I should be. Now that I know about it know, I'm definitely going to make use of it. Especially if I need to hunt down a deal and don't have time to do the brunt work!