Every day another e-commerce startup pops up with a new way to get us all to buy more stuff, from a web-wide shopping cart to no shopping cart at all. But according to Gidi Fisher, the most powerful ways to get shoppers to buy more are time-tested traditions: coupons and sales.

That's why Fisher launched PoachIt, a New York City-based e-commerce company that tracks products across the web to see when they go on sale. The service also automatically validates coupon codes and serves up only the ones that work. To date, the startup has saved shoppers more than $22 million dollars, Fisher says, or an average of $47 per product.

"When people are browsing the web, they want to buy,” he says. “We want to make it easy for you to buy right now with a coupon, or, if you want to wait, we’re there for you, too."

Shopping Like a Human

PoachIt’s service hinges on sophisticated web crawlers that scour the web to search for sales and coupons. Users either download a Chrome extension or add the PoachIt button to their bookmark bar. Then, when they find a product they like on a retailer’s website, they can click the PoachIt button to either track the item until it goes on sale or see if there are any coupons available.

PoachIt users can track a product until it goes on sale. PoachIt users can track a product until it goes on sale. Screenshot: PoachIt

PoachIt’s crawlers scan over 5,000 web retailers twice a day to check prices on products. They also scan coupon aggregating sites like Coupons.com and RetailMeNot and cull codes from merchant mailing lists. The system then automatically validates those codes on the retailers’ own websites by essentially acting like a human and filling up shopping carts across the web to test each and every code. That means the technology needs to understand if a coupon is only valid on purchases over $100 or whether it only applies to swimwear.

“The system is able to detect what the description is and understands how to play,” says Fisher. “It took us a good amount of time to develop it, because we had to create it all in house. Nothing else exists out there that we could lean on.”

Poaching the Competition

Today, PoachIt generates revenue from affiliate fees, but Fisher says he’s also talking to retailers who want to get their hands on competitor pricing data. “If we have those relationships in place, we may also be able to get our users proprietary discounts and coupons they couldn't get elsewhere,” he says.

Fisher now has a patent pending on PoachIt’s technology to protect the company from its much more formidable competitors. And there are many. RetailMeNot, for one, is a publicly traded company, worth nearly $1 billion. If a giant like that tried to build similar technology, Fisher admits that PoachIt, a scrappy 10-person startup with just $2 million in angel funding, might be in trouble.

>PoachIt has tested some 4 million coupon codes and found that 80 percent of them don’t actually work.

Earlier this month, one of PoachIt's most visible competitors, a similar price-tracking service called Hukkster, suddenly announced that it was shutting down operations. As it turned out, the closure had little to do with the business model, though. Instead, Buzzfeed reports, it came down to strife between Hukkster's investors Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss and a potential acquirer. It was an unfortunate end for a smart startup, but one that leaves PoachIt in a prime position to...well, poach Hukkster's 300,000 customers.

In the end, if PoachIt can defend its intellectual property and continue offering customers deals that really work, it’s hard to see why any consumer would ever shop online without it. After all, Fisher notes, since PoachIt launched the company has tested some 4 million codes, many of which come from aggregators, and found that 80 percent of them don’t actually work. "Those sites force you into trial and error," he says. "Without us, there's a one in five chance you'd actually find a deal."