I spent the past year creating Price Hipster, a product search engine and price watching website for the OzBargain community!

Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 01/11/2015 - 11:45
Last edited 13/11/2015 - 12:45

Update 13/11/15: Thanks everyone for the support and feedback! I realise there are heaps of comments here and no one wants to read through them all. If you have a suggestion, it has probably already been raised. I'm currently working on a big update and I'll be sure to let you all know when I release it. I'll be keen to get further feedback and suggestions then. :-)

Hi fellow OzBargainers!

I've spent the past year creating a powerful tool for you all.

https://www.pricehipster.com.au/

These are the reasons I created Price Hipster:

  1. Searching for products across multiple stores is painful. Sometimes you don't even know which stores to check for a product. Wouldn't it be great to conveniently search all stores from one place?

  2. Even if you want to find a product in one particular store, most store websites are very bad at searching their own products, and they're slow at it.

  3. There is no convenient way to find out the previous prices of products, making it difficult to hold vendors accountable for false claims of discounts. Some products vary wildly in price. Some change price nearly every day. For example:

https://www.pricehipster.com.au/product?id=NJNmxsZ3k5n

I really appreciate those OzBargainers who have taken the time to use internet archives to dig up previous prices, but it's less than ideal, and hopefully will now be a thing of the past!

Price Hipster currently includes 5 websites in its index. That will expand in the near future.

Questions for you all:

  1. Which stores should be added next?

  2. OzBargainers in Western Australia, how is the search latency for you? The search servers are in Sydney. I live in Brisbane and the search is pretty much instantaneous here.

If you find any issues with the website or have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

General Discussion

Related Stores

Price Hipster
Price Hipster

Comments

  • antman on 09/12/2024 - 14:13

    Hi, not getting emails anymore. Is that not happening now?

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 09/12/2024 - 14:57

      Yeah someone else told me that recently. I've got a few weeks off work soon where I'll be able to update a bunch of stuff, and likely fix that issue, among others.

      • antman on 09/12/2024 - 15:11

        Thanks mate, keep up the nice work!

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 09/12/2024 - 15:25

          ❤️

    • wisdomtooth on 09/12/2024 - 17:17

      Last email alerts I got were exactly 1 week ago.

  • ECE on 09/12/2024 - 15:00

    Thank you OP

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 09/12/2024 - 15:25

      ❤️

  • antman on 28/12/2024 - 17:28

    Just got my first email for a while! If you changed something - thanks!

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 28/12/2024 - 17:39
      +3

      Hey thanks for the confirmation!

      I'm currently working on the rewrite of Price Hipster and I found the problem. I decided to just fix it immediately.

  • Alley Cat on 08/07/2025 - 10:30
    +1

    Hiya, just checking in — how's it going? I went to look for pork belly historic prices, but found the site to be completely different now. Have you sold it?

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 09/07/2025 - 07:46
      +1

      Haven't sold it. Just finally got around to updating it. 😅

      • Alley Cat on 09/07/2025 - 09:06

        😂 I hope you can get the grocery prices back somehow. Maybe go to ACCC or something and ask them about price transparency and whatever colesworths have been doing to block price hipster. Failing that, you might want to look at crowdsourcing the price-tracking. The site looks like staticice x camelcamelcamel atm, which isn't very useful.

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 09/07/2025 - 09:27
          +1

          I only just pushed the update 2 days ago. It's not even finished yet. Still working on it. I don't know if Colesworth will be back.

      • isthisreallife22 on 09/07/2025 - 10:12
        +1

        Nice one Jazoom!

        Heads up Ive been playing with some price trackers lately and have found that vibe coding (or even just giving chatgpt the page address) can give you almost perfect logic for scraping pretty much anything after a few iterations.

        Just something to think about

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 09/07/2025 - 12:19
          +1

          Yeah I've found LLMs to be great for many things. I couldn't have done this rewrite before the end of this year without them. For a challenge you might try pointing your prompt towards Chemist Warehouse's new website. It's pretty horrific (no CSS selectors anywhere, 8+MB home page without even counting images 😬). Is this really what "HTML" has become?

          • wisdomtooth on 11/07/2025 - 10:10

            @jazoom: Yeah, was wondering where CW went after the update… But it worked before! 🤷🏼‍♂️

            • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 11/07/2025 - 11:32
              +1

              @wisdomtooth: CW changed their website recently

              • wisdomtooth on 11/07/2025 - 11:54

                @jazoom: Have you tried piggybacking off of Google or Bing Shopping?

                • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 12/07/2025 - 06:26

                  @wisdomtooth: I can't imagine this being useful, but I might be misunderstanding your meaning.

                  • fredblogs on 14/07/2025 - 21:36

                    @jazoom: My guess is that they meant you could scrape Google Shopping instead of Chemist Warehouse directly.

          • isthisreallife22 on 14/07/2025 - 21:39
            +1

            @jazoom: I'm happy to have a play

          • tenpercent on 14/07/2025 - 22:01
            +2

            @jazoom: It's definitely ugly but the prices can still be scraped. I have my own script to manually do it for products of interest to me that I run once a week until Price Hipster gets has it again. Obviously manually running a script once a week isn't as good as getting email notifications from PH and being able to see the full price history.

            Eg. For this product, all the relevant data is inside this element

            …script type="application/ld+json">{"@context":"https://schema.org/","@type":"Product","sku":"2718360","brand":{"@type":"Brand","name":"Swisse"},"aggregateRating":{"@type":"AggregateRating","ratingCount":11,"reviewCount":11,"bestRating":"5","ratingValue":5,"worstRating":"1"},"offers":{"@type":"Offer","url":"","priceCurrency":"AUD","price":32.99,"availability":"http://schema.org/InStock"},"name":"Swisse Ultiboost Vitamin K2 60 Capsules"}…

            Note elipses are my own as I can't post a comment with the rest of the code.
            It's the same structure for every product page.

            FWIW I preferred the old look dark mode Price Hipster.

            Seeing as you're in the process of updating the site, if you're still taking feature requests, then a button to export price history to csv would be useful.

            • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 20/07/2025 - 12:14

              @tenpercent: I'll have a play again when I revisit the scraper in the not-too-distant future.

              Price Hipster never before had a dark mode. I think the only dark thing about it was the header at the top of the page. I'll revisit the theme and try to make it a bit nicer. Dark mode was done rather hastily, just as part of creating the settings for it.

              What's the use case for exporting price history?

              • tenpercent on 20/07/2025 - 14:00

                @jazoom:

                Price Hipster never before had a dark mode.

                Really? The background used to be black or grey, from memory? It felt like 'dark mode'. Maybe 'dark mode' isn't the correct term.

                What's the use case for exporting price history?

                One of the use cases for me personally would be to visualise the data across multiple stores and across similar products (within or between stores) after normalising for volume/weight and concentration of active ingredients. I already do this, just with very sparse data that I manually collect from time to time. A complete price history data set would help me see how differerent stores time their discounts relative to one another, across different brands of similar products, seasonally (e.g. eofy, prime day, black friday, christmas, boxing day, new years, autumn winter vs spring summer)…

                • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 20/07/2025 - 14:12
                  +1

                  @tenpercent: Interesting thing you got going there. Like the pricehipster for statisticians.

                  Old version never had theming. Was basically all light except the header was dark grey. Header was quite tall on large screens and the search bar was within it.

            • mshanann on 22/08/2025 - 12:10

              @tenpercent: Have you got one for bunnings by chance?

      • jjoker on 11/07/2025 - 17:26

        Hi Any plans to add the historical option back in like the old version had?

        • nocure on 11/07/2025 - 18:25

          Scroll down

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 12/07/2025 - 06:42

          I'm thinking not. Previously the product database was also the search database, but now they are separate. Currently, out of the many millions of products in the database, only about 300000 are in the search database (more coming soon). Including all historical products in the search database will make it less efficient and slower in returning results, all for an edge case that will rarely get used.

          You actually can see details of any product, as long as you have its ID (not super helpful for you, I know), because the product details page directly fetches the data from the full database.

  • mshanann on 22/08/2025 - 12:11

    @jazoom Is there any bunnings price watch / notify functionality available? i.e like the 3 camels - get notified when an item drops below a price threshold?

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 24/08/2025 - 09:54

      You can do that with any product on Price Hipster.

      • mshanann on 25/08/2025 - 21:44

        @jazoom Presumably you need to sign up / authenticate then? 3Cs - you can create price watch without signing up

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 30/08/2025 - 09:22

          I need to make that apparent on the product details page. Thanks for pointing that out.

  • wisdomtooth on 25/08/2025 - 14:00

    Any news on reintegrating Chemist Warehouse? Maybe remove it from the filter till it's done?

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 30/08/2025 - 09:22

      Done. Thanks.

  • nookie on 26/08/2025 - 23:28

    @jazoom why i no longer subscribed to PH? Somehow it has stopped emailing me

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 30/08/2025 - 09:23

      I'm waiting until I'm happy with the new update. Gotta add a bunch of new stores still.

      • nookie on 30/08/2025 - 11:52

        Love your work all the best mate

        • wisdomtooth on 30/08/2025 - 16:55
          -1

          I do too, but I'd rather @jazoom didn't take the working version offline before the new version was production ready. That's not how software development is done, tbh.

          • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 30/08/2025 - 17:00
            +2

            @wisdomtooth: The old version hadn't worked well for years. Search was broken and I couldn't fix the old version, just to give one example.

            Software development is done however the developer wants, when it's done as a hobby and no one is paying for it.

            • wisdomtooth on 31/08/2025 - 10:02
              +1

              @jazoom: You don't take affiliate money? I would. I've spent $1000s at CW I probably wouldn't otherwise have bc PriceHipster told me it was at an ATL.

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