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From two hours of email-writing to thirty seconds: what automating a price claim actually looks like

ProductErdunCo-founderMay 13, 20263 min read

From two hours of email-writing to thirty seconds: what automating a price claim actually looks like

Here's an actual price-protection claim, the manual way. You bought a Sony WH-1000XM5 from Best Buy four days ago for $399. You notice today it's $349. You're owed $50. Here's what you have to do.

  1. Find your original purchase confirmation email. Scroll through inbox, search by retailer, find the right order.
  2. Check Best Buy's price-protection policy. Verify it's still inside the 15-day window for your product category.
  3. Take a screenshot of the current lower price, with the date visible.
  4. Find Best Buy's price-match form. (It's buried.) Fill it out with order number, original price, current price, and screenshot.
  5. Wait. Submit. Wait again. Eventually get the refund issued to your original payment method.

Most people who track their time would put this at 30-60 minutes of attention spread over 2-3 days. We've timed enthusiastic friends doing it carefully and they take closer to two hours. The refund is $50.

Now the ClaimIt way

You buy the headphones on Tuesday. The agent reads the purchase confirmation, extracts that you paid $399, and starts monitoring the price. On Saturday at 6:17 PM, the price drops to $349 on Best Buy's site. The agent confirms it's a real drop (not a regional anomaly), confirms the policy window is still open, and drafts a claim using Best Buy's in-store guide format.

You get one notification: "Best Buy price drop on Sony WH-1000XM5. Refund estimate: $50. Approve to file." You tap approve. The agent submits the claim. You see the outcome in the dashboard a day or two later. Total time you spent: 30 seconds.

The 30 seconds is approval time. The actual claim filing, monitoring, and outcome handling happens in the background. You don't have to be paying attention.

What it adds up to

Manually claiming refunds doesn't scale. Even motivated people give up after their second or third claim. The math is bad. But automation reverses it. If ClaimIt files four claims a year for you at $40 average, that's $160 you weren't going to collect. Spread across the eligible purchases an active household actually makes, it compounds quickly.

The point of the agent isn't that any single claim is impossible without it. The point is that the workflow is annoying enough that no one ever does it, and that the agent makes it cost zero attention, so suddenly everyone can.

E
Erdun

Erdun

Co-founder

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