If you were a HotUKDeals user who has been put off by all of the bot activity, you’ll be on the hunt for a new deals board. Enter: PandaPicks, a UK-based deals site where the community both add deals and police them. I was user number 36 to join the site after seeing u/FarmerTed’s post on r/UKFrugal on Reddit and have since been charmed by its clean, user-friendly interface.
Deal-hunting is a great way to save money, but browsing PandaPicks will save you hours of browsing retailers in the hope of finding the discounted products you want. I got in touch with Ted, founder of PandaPicks, to find out more about the site and how to use it to find the best deals (and how to tell the good ones from the bad).
Before we crack on with the interview, I’d like to point out it is PandaPicks.co.uk, not .io the betting site.
What is PandaPicks and where did you get the idea to start a deals site? Who’s the team behind it?
PandaPicks is a free-to-use, community-driven UK deals website with a Reddit-style voting system. The community posts and decides which deals are best, these deals float to the top of everyone’s page. There are no editorial teams picking favourites, no sponsored slots and no banner ads.
Who’s on the team?
It’s just me building it – a fully solo project for now. I’m a software engineer and PandaPicks is the side project I’ve been wanting to do for a while!
Who is PandaPicks for and who can add deals?
It’s for absolutely anyone in the UK looking for a genuinely curated set of deals. Posting is open to anyone with a free account, there’s no application process. Somebody who has just joined has just as much of a right to post as someone who’s been posting since launch. We are always accepting new people to join the community!
How do users use the site to find the deals they’re after?
Users can discover deals in multiple ways:
- Browsing the main theme: sort by trending or top of the week/month. Trending is a decayed vote score so a deal posted 3 hours ago can still beat one with more votes from yesterday
- Filter by Category: Tech, Travel, Home etc.
- Browse by merchant: You can browse live deals from your favourite retailers
- Search: A search system allowing you to filter by title and description
- Keyword alerts: Receive an email notification when a post reaches a certain number of upvotes and trends
- Email Digest: Opt in for a daily/weekly roundup of the top deals so you don’t need to continuously check the site!
- Exclude Merchants: You can hide merchants you aren’t a fan of, allowing more room for the merchants you appreciate
Are deals verified? How do people know they’re trustworthy?
I would say this can be split into 2 sections; the first being community moderated. User voting / flagging allows the best deals to rise to the surface. If a deal isn’t legit, it can be easily be repoted and then reviewed by myself. The other side involves the backend algorithm I have in place to prevent bot submissions. Without going into too much detail, I have measures in place that will evaluate the “legitness” of a post, helping us weed out the unlawful posts.
How are you going to stop it being overrun by bots/going the same way as HotUKDeals?
I’m going to continue to monitor and update the anti-bot measures if needs be. I will do everything I can to prevent any bot postings.
From what I’ve read a lot of issues that sit with HotUKDeals are moderation based, people getting banned for little to no reason, moderators removing posts so the can repost with their own referral link. PandaPicks will never do that, it undermines the whole purpose of being a community driven site, we won’t alter posts – the content the community posts is theirs to own.
I see you’re running deal-posting incentives (like the Amazon gift voucher)…
Every month we giveaway 3x £50 Amazon gift cards to the top 3 posters of the month. I count the votes on the last day of the month and send an e-mail with the gift cards on the next day.
I also wanted to discuss a bit about what’s to come in the future. I’m currently working on improving the site in many ways such as: marketing emails, Android/IOS app, discussion board on the app – this is all to come in the following few months!
Cheers, Ted! We look forward to the evolution of PandaPicks. Even in the past week, since your post in r/UKfrugal, the number of users on the site has increased tenfold. The future looks bright.
