DigitalBeat

The longest recession in a generation is making deal-hunting a lot more pressing for consumers and a San Francisco Bay Area-startup called Spreezio is trying to cash in on it.

The premise of the site is simple: local consumers log in, search for a service they’re interested in like buying a TV or a pizza, request some perks like free delivery or 15 percent off, and wait for nearby businesses to respond with offers. Local merchants who are part of Spreezio make counter-offers and then the buyer picks the best one.

“Even before the recession reared its ugly head, I started to notice many for-lease signs around my neighborhood,” said founder Todd Chipman. “That got me thinking about solutions on how local businesses could compete in a more effective way.”

Launched two weeks ago in Willow Glen, a neighborhood of San Jose, Calif., the service has signed up 41 merchants looking to retain shoppers amid the downturn. Chipman says the company will also roll out nationally through partnerships with big-box retailers and plans to launch an iPhone application in the next two to three months.

Spreezio will earn money by charging for premium services to local businesses, which may include opportunities to market to consumers just at the moment when they’re deciding between offers.

“We have a real-time shopping solution. Shoppers have the ability to look at the deal, say that it’s a fantastic deal and accept it. Businesses can sweeten their offer or counter with something that makes sense for their business,” Chipman said. “The early bird catches the worm, so merchants are keeping the application open and walking by to see what deals have come into their bucket.”

Spreezio is self-funded and employs nine people. The company has a more intensive approach to comparison shopping than its competition, but it will take aggressive community building to execute it successfully. So far, after its first two weeks in beta testing in just the Willow Glen neighborhood, it’s only seen 52 customers join up. So it’s certainly got its work cut out for it. To entice local shoppers to make return visits to the site, Spreezio needs to have more than a single business make an offer on a consumer’s query, and that requires a critical mass of participating merchants. That’s easier to do when focused on a tightly-knit neighborhood but much harder to replicate on a national scale.

The company will also face competition from several other comparison shopping sites out there like Pricegrabber, Bizrate, NexTag, Shopzilla and Become along with offerings from AOL and Yahoo.

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