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Harrison Zanuck turned his passion for online shopping and savings into his first internet venture, evreward.com - a service which compares shopping rewards for 3,000 stores and services and 40 rewards programs. Offline, he is a film and television producer living in Los Angeles, CA.

The launch of new price comparison and rewards website Jellyfish has brought about a lot of talk about revolutionary new advertising models, grandiose visions of consumer empowerment and other “big ideas”. That’s fine for press releases and building buzz, but what really impresses me most about this service is the opportunity to bring cash back shopping to the mainstream internet consumer.

For me, the magic of Jellyfish isn’t its snazzy AJAX interface, 1000 stores or five million products. You can find all that elsewhere, and to be honest, you can find better price comparison engines – but none so well integrated into a rewards program. And that’s where Jellyfish’s promise shines the brightest.

This is a service I would recommend to my mother, grandmother, or any tech neophyte just wading into the sea of internet savings. The interface is clean and simple, you’re not bombarded by ads or e-mails, and no parasitic software is dangled in front of you. You simply type in a product and you’re given a price that’s better than what you’d pay at the store if you went there directly. For most people, that’s a powerful hook.

The second part of Jellyfish’s magic, and not to be underestimated, is its approach to merchant relationships. I think the talk about “empowering” may be more appropriate to this case, rather than to consumers, who are really just passive beneficiaries of Jellyfish’s new “Value Per Action” search advertising model.

I can’t claim to understand VPA, and certainly there’s a lot to be proven, but the big benefit I see here is that Jellyfish may very well change the tenor of the often tenuous tug-of-war between merchant and rewards program over consumer loyalty. Because this system gives merchants an opportunity to more directly influence sales with their ad spending, they’re more apt to consider Jellyfish a partner rather than hijacker when it comes to customers. Even if the value of this is more semantic than practical, by giving merchants some ownership of the process, they’re more likely to trust the referrals Jellyfish generates, leading to more competition for those referrals, and ultimately, better rebates for all.

If the current generation of cash back programs have missed the boat when it comes to the user experience and merchant relationships, Jellyfish seems well positioned to capture what up to now has been an under-exploited facet of the internet shopping landscape. There are other options, and it may not be a site I frequent personally (after all, it’s hard to build loyalty when many people are loyal to simply the lowest price or the biggest rebate), but Jellyfish is a good bet for the consumer who wants to save on most purchases, and doesn’t want to spend a lot of time shopping around.

To me, that’s the real hope in all the hype.