Mild Surprise - Australian Retail Price Tracker
As seen on the JB HiFi deal - thought it deserved a forum post to promote some discussion. We're finally at a spot where we feel comfortable sharing it around.
Currently it gets the prices of:
- Harvey Norman
- Officeworks
- JB HiFi
These are updated twice daily and price drops are shown on each of the main pages – let me know if you have any ideas. All items are graphed on their individual pages too, so have a squizz at the items you're interested in.
Trying not to make this advertisey, just posting it because I think quite a lot of you will love it just like we do – we don't make any money from it at the moment :)
Comments
+2 votesI found even a single low end VPS with asynchronous crawler + parser you'll have no problem consuming all the pages on a retailer site (depending on the complexity of the parser). Hosting the crawler overseas to save on the bandwidth cost (easy to find a VPS with 500GB-1TB for $5/month).
Just make sure you don't over-crawl the website & get your servers banned :)
+1 votem0nkeycheese on 28/12/2012 - 20:37 ¶Awesome! I can already see many deals being posted thanks to this! One suggestion? Can there be a search function? That would complete it. Great work guys
Looks good. Maybe swap 'Next Day | Previous Day' around, more intuitive the other way around.
Would be good to have an option to set a date range, eg. last week, last month, last 10 days etc. or maybe you have other ideas to make this sort of info more accessible? And other than asking you to add more stores, not much to comment at this stage. Look at 3xcamel….
Hi guys, well done with your website, looking real good and will only get better and better.
I am going back at least 5 or 6 years can anybody remember the australian based price comparison website for computer parts…..something price…..price somthing…. This had some great features, just trying to remember the finer details :(
GetPrice or StaticIce?
List of price comparison websites.
StaticIce is good but I'm a bit wary of those price comparison sites as you're never quite sure who pays to come up on top. Google Shopping are entirely paid listings for example.Well done on the new features. I see you've started a thread on Whirlpool as well ;).
The formula is the square root of the percent difference multiplied by the price drop. That way it takes into account both variables for a better idea of a good deal. We're working on making a cool formula that takes into account the lowest price of the item as well, to tell you if it's a good deal.
- +1 vote
Cool. But not really a surprise factor, more like a magnitude factor. Surprise would be if it has not been discounted before, or if the discount would be out of the ordinary. Anyway, cool factor still :-)
Why is there no update today?
"No Price Changes on this Date!"
gamesfromeverywhere on 29/12/2012 - 21:08 ¶God start. It would be good if an online store could add its own feed to the site as well.
- +2 votesm0nkeycheese on 29/12/2012 - 22:27 ¶
No way then it would just be spam. Plus that's what ozbargain is for
AnotherGenius on 30/12/2012 - 21:25 ¶This is a great idea! It would be cool if the search box appeared on every page though. Maybe you could add the store selection to the homepage as well. Also, I know I'm being picky, but the template is a little dull. Maybe try something with some colour?
Anyway, your doing a great job and if you do add more stores like mentioned above your site could easily compete with staticICE, etc.
I managed to get results for 60" 3d tv - it looks like somethings wrong with the searching stuff, it is more of a kludge for now anyway, slowly working on fixing problems. I've got a meeting with an ex-boss who is pretty pro at web design and all this web 2.0 ajaxy stuff, so the site will start looking more and more professional soon!
try it without the "
The " may denote the beginning of a string somewhere in the code and cause it to error, and I am guessing instead of erroring, it just returns a null value.
edit: I dont know how to do web design or whatnot, but that would screw with some of the SQL stuff I know how to do.
greenpossum on 05/01/2013 - 12:02 ¶The " may denote the beginning of a string somewhere in the code and cause it to error
If one is writing code in the program to cater for whether there is a " inside input or not, then one is doing it the wrong way. One day one will forget to use escape_string() or whatever the equivalent is in the implementation language, then one has a SQL injection hole. Just use prepared statements and/or placeholders everywhere and the underlying library routine will take care of the special characters all the time.
I am in the process of adding advertisements to item pages. I'll make them as unintrusive as possible - also I'll make it so everyone with an account (and logged in) doesn't see the advertisements. Also looking at making them only appear when the eBay price is a certain % under the product's price Buy It Now.
The account passwords are secured using one-way (no, not md5) encryption with a complex randomised salt.
- +1 vote
Wow!
http://mildsurprise.com/item.php?item=c12940bf639b22de15f748...
Check out that one.
Date Price
03-01-2013 499.00
31-12-2013 598.00
24-12-2012 498.00
11-12-2012 598.00Same thing with their other Hisense TV:
http://mildsurprise.com/item.php?item=7cac27898b743a9855524a...Date Price
03-01-2013 596.00
31-12-2013 696.00
24-12-2012 596.00
11-12-2012 696.00Dodgy much?
This is the best website I have seen in ages. Thank you so much.
I'm wary of JB during their sales. I remember going to one of the Sydney stores a week prior to their sale and during the sale. I noticed one blu-ray I was interested in was marked up and stamped with the 20% off sticker. The net effect was that the price of the item was unchanged. I think that sort of conduct is deceptive because the buyer thinks that they're saving 20% when it's just the ordinary price of the item.
Not sure. but there would need to be some kind of data feed considering that you can shop online.
can you imagine setting up alerts for when your long life items go on sale? I would save a cool mil (and by mil I mean possibly $100) on cleaning products/cat food/spaghetti sauces/glad wrap…
If you guys are going in that direction, you should talk to Mygroceries as they internally have historical data for their specials.
We actually had someone from the newspaper contact us looking to compare last years prices for Christmas food products with this years. Unfortunately, the supermarkets do a great job of varying their products in size, features, or brands on a regular basis to throw off any kind of accurate comparison. Non-perishables would probably be a different story though.
As far as I know the non-catalogue specials change every Wednesday along with the catalogue specials, you won't see a change during the week unless there's a "late week special" (Fri-Sun), also Coles's fruit + veg specials run from Fri - Thu.
Don't know about Coles but I check Woolies's online site for specials before shopping, the price will sometimes be higher or lower in-store but it gives you an indication of what's on special at least. When there's a minimum $100 spend for a fuel voucher I want to make sure I don't spend more than a dollar or two above that amount given what can be purchased for a cheaper price from the local fruit + veg shop / Aldi etc.
As you have to take into account the online prices being slightly different than in-store, and the Woolies app doesn't have a feature to keep track of your total as you put things in the trolley (whhhhhhy), out comes the calculator to make sure I'm not short as I get to the register, saves that awkward dash to get another item when your total comes to $99.xx (happened to me a couple times, whoops).
Don't know how you'd get accurate in-store prices for non-catalogue stuff but good luck.. :)
4
Great site. I guess I'd like to see it go the direction of Camelx3.