Introducing Buywisely.com.au: A New Price Comparison and Price History Tracking Website

AssociatedLddvkid @ Buy Wisely on 24/05/2023 - 14:28
Last edited 19/06/2023 - 20:40

Hey there, OzBargain!

I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling frustrated with the difficulty of comparing prices across hundreds of websites, and the lack of information that can inform my purchasing decisions. I can't stand that moment when I think, "shit, you bought it from where for how much less?" I mean, Ozbargain is awesome, but sometimes we also need access to more comprehensive information like price comparisons and price history.

So, I decided to take matters into my own hands. In mid-February, I started coding what would become buywisely.com.au. It went live on the 1st of April, and since our chatGPT plugin (the 83rd one globally!) came online, we've been getting a decent amount of traffic.

Today, 3 months later, BuyWisely boasts nearly 1 million products from over 20k online stores, and those numbers are growing every day.

Based on the feedback, the search functionality has been rewritten and a grocery category has been added.
Thanks again to everyone for the inputs!
buywisely.com.au

General Discussion

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Comments

  • AustriaBargain on 24/05/2023 - 14:41

    I think instead of RRP, or maybe as well as RRP, you should have a "regular" or "usually" price on the cards on the front page. Sony headphones now $23 down from $125 it says, wow what a bargain, but when you click on it you see two dozen other shops are also selling it for $23 so it's not actually a bargain that's just what they normally cost.

    And I don't know about the domain. I see buywise.com.au is being squatted on. And it looks like buy wisely.com.ay is taken so you can't redirect that to your .com.au. Half of why ozbargain is popular is because the name rolls off the tongue. If it were aussiebargain.com.au then it wouldn't be half as popular.

    • Associatedddvkid @ Buy Wisely on 24/05/2023 - 15:23
      +1

      I completely agree. Initially, I thought it would be straightforward to show users the real "price drop" instead of relying on what the seller claims. But, I soon realized that was a bit naive. It's shockingly common for sellers to increase the price before advertising a discount.

      Here's a good example: the LG 65QLED85 4K Mini Smart LED TV listed on our site. Both Harvey Norman and JB Hi-Fi had it listed for $1595 in March. Then, they increased the price to $3295, dropped it to $1995, and claimed a $1300 discount.
      This is an intriguing problem to solve. I'll have to give it more thought. Thanks again for your insights.

      • AustriaBargain on 24/05/2023 - 15:24

        But your site tracks price history so it shouldn't matter if they price jack just before a sale. Just write some javascript or whatever to take into account temporary price jacks. Get ChatGPT to do it for you.

        • Associatedddvkid @ Buy Wisely on 24/05/2023 - 15:44

          It's a brilliant idea! so I could give all the price history data to ChatGPT by category and let it provide the deals suggestions, instead of implementing my own algorithm, I believe ChatGPT can do that, thanks heaps.

      • spackbace on 24/05/2023 - 15:27

        Take the "usually" price as an average price, or median price, for say the last 3 months?

        • Associatedddvkid @ Buy Wisely on 24/05/2023 - 20:25

          yep yep, needs longer history tho, for now, I just have 2 months of history.

  • Look Up on 24/05/2023 - 14:45
    +3

    Looks like a reskinned Little Birdie, down to the power sapping search animation on the front page

    And just like Little Birdie, the product search and hierarchy curation by "AI" is poor

    Even worse this is the default sorting by "Relevance"

    • Associatedddvkid @ Buy Wisely on 24/05/2023 - 15:07

      yea it's a good one actually thanks,
      the reason why that search results went way off is that it was trying to retrieve 1000 products from DB and order by similarity + rank, but when you select sorting by price, it ignores the similarity and only order by price.
      let me think, thanks again.

      • Look Up on 24/05/2023 - 15:14

        Instead of crowd sourcing your user testing on OzBargain, get some real people who are experts in their categories to run some typical searches and give you their feedback

        People will use a Toyota with a V8, they won't use a Ferrari with a lawn mower engine

  • randomusername2017 on 24/05/2023 - 14:48

    see a piece of feedback that you agree with…

    Feedback✅

    lol

  • snoopydoop on 24/05/2023 - 15:48
    +1

    Didn't find the search great. For example I searched for "Xbox controller" and the top results are off-brand ones being sold on ebay, not representive of the image displayed.
    Gotta scroll down a bit to find the actual official results and it takes more stuffing around than just searching it in the shopping tab on Google.

    From a few other searches, they seem a bit unpredictable. Even when I'm really specific, with terms that populate Google entirely with the exact product I'm looking for, whereas I search it here and sometimes it is nowhere to be found.

    The idea of price tracking across multiple retailers could be interesting to me, I visit camelcamelcamel a bit, but my general feeling with this website is that maybe things won't be accurate, and I'll need to double check them anyway elsewhere. Or that it'll compare prices across only a few retailers and then there'll be another "product" that is exactly the same, where it is comparing them elsewhere.

    My hesitation with this sort of thing as well is the fact that you can't compare the price with various coupons. Maybe one site seems like it has a "higher" price but is running a 50% off coupon therefore making it even cheaper than the "cheapest" price. To me that is a big barrier from using this sort of site, I don't feel like I'm getting the best possible price from it, nor accurate picture of what the historically cheapest price has actually been.
    It's easier for single store trackers like camelcamelcamel because you have an idea that there hasn't been that sort of sitewide coupon with amazon, and you know you can leverage discounted gift cards/cashback etc but the price tracking you're seeing is pretty accurate otherwise.

    Best of luck!

    • Associatedddvkid @ Buy Wisely on 24/05/2023 - 16:05
      +1

      Thanks for the insights, really appreciate it!
      It seems like I really need to refactor the search mechanism, I think I know how to improve it.
      As for the coupons, I'm aware of it but it involves tons of work and probably not a one man job, currently I just want to focus on one thing and do it good first, but will definitely come back to it whenever I can.

      • snoopydoop on 24/05/2023 - 16:11

        Yeah, I think the coupon thing isn't something that is necessarily solvable or viable for now since it can be quite complex from retailer to retailer. I don't think I've really seen anyone achieve that. I guess that would essentially be an automated/AI powered Ozbargain!

        I just retried search by treating it a bit more like 3xcamels, searching for the URL of a phone from JB Hifi, that seemed to work better and did point me to a cheaper retailer. In its current state that's the only way I can imagine using it right now, with the price tracking functionality. And ilkely only with obvious mainstream products, nothing niche or super specific.

        Thanks mate hope it goes well!

    • parsimonious one on 24/05/2023 - 16:09

      Yeah, I agree the search function isn’t great.

      I was searching for kuhl hiking pants

      When I put “kuhl” in the search bar the thumbnail list shows relevant products (ie kuhl branded clothes) but when I hit search a whole bunch of unrelated stuff comes up and the relevant stuff in the preview is gone

      • Associatedddvkid @ Buy Wisely on 24/05/2023 - 16:23
        +1

        right, it was probably because I put all the information (name, description and specs) to chatgpt to search, but it was not able to index the name, which is supposed to be. maybe I should just send name, then we won't be able to search for descriptions and specs… fine tunning on chatgpt are freaking expensive.

  • leiiv on 24/05/2023 - 16:38

    Too many small shops. Have you included all the bigger shops? For example, is IKEA there?
    Any plan to add grocery category and include Coles as well?
    What about an exact search feature by entering the url of the product, aka camel3x style?

    • Associatedddvkid @ Buy Wisely on 24/05/2023 - 19:31
      +1

      I've been having second thoughts about whether I should include as many shops as possible. It's becoming increasingly obvious that the initial strategy may have been misguided—more doesn't always mean better.

      I have all the Trustpilot reviews for the stores, so I believe I can quickly implement a filter for only the more reputable names.

      The grocery category has been deprioritised due to the enormous number of products it could potentially include; I would need to upgrade my server and database just for this category.

      Regarding the URL search, it's already there. For instance, if you paste an Amazon URL into the search bar, it will return the item if it's in our database. This feature is somewhat hidden for now, as it can be frustrating if there are not enough products in the database.

      • AustriaBargain on 24/05/2023 - 21:21

        Are you set up to get the relevant affiliate money for links to stores like Amazon and eBay?

      • leiiv on 24/05/2023 - 23:46

        How does the system decided on which product/item to track? Does it just crawl everything in the store websites?
        I think that it is impossible to track every single consumer product if you do not have Google-scale infrastructure.
        Would you consider prioritising the ones in which the URL has been entered specifically by the users?
        And the list of included/supported stores would be very helpful.

        • Associatedddvkid @ Buy Wisely on 24/05/2023 - 23:52

          I think I made a bad decision trying to crawl as many products/stores as possible, luckily it's not too late to fix that.
          To answer your question, I'm crawling the popular products for each website.

          Would you consider prioritising the ones in which the URL has been entered specifically by the users?
          yep let me think about supporting users to request URLs, thanks

  • wanj on 24/05/2023 - 17:20

    How are you scraping your data? Wouldn't it be difficult to cover every e-commerce seller out there and have scraping API's for each one?

  • ninohax on 24/05/2023 - 19:40

    Trialled the website. The search functionality needs fixing. It does not return accurate results. The idea of comparing the price across various retailers and price history is great. I am very much interested in the price history feature particularly because I like having a historical look at how prices have fluctuated over time, the frequency at which the prices have changed and how low it has gone to since the chances of the prices going back to those lows are highly likely. I also think there is value in displaying the lowest price the item has gone to and at which retailer in a text description format somewhere below the price range info that you are currently displaying so that I can have a quick glance at it and know that information without having to read the price history graph. I would also personally love to see a grocery categories where you have all the grocery products listed so that I can keep a track of when a particular product went on half price last time so that I can predict when it will go on half price again as Colesworths half price system is mostly cyclical in nature. And lastly It would be great if you could capture the full ingredient list instead of just the main ingredient in the product information tab for grocery products, Overall a really good effort, just that the website needs a bit more polishing and search needs fixing.

    • Associatedddvkid @ Buy Wisely on 24/05/2023 - 20:24
      +2

      thanks heap, the feedback is super valuable, let me summarize:
      - Search needs to be fixed (I'm doing it right now)
      - price history and price comparison are very useful
      - UI improvement for the displaying price
      - Grocery (hmmm, this is 2nd feedback about it, let's see if we can get more for me to prioritise it)

      • leiiv on 24/05/2023 - 23:39
        +1

        Grocery (Coles and Woolworths) is very useful because you can just go to one place to compare each week prices. And the price is pretty stable (it stays the same for a week) compared to some products at Amazon for example.

        • Associatedddvkid @ Buy Wisely on 24/05/2023 - 23:48
          +1

          Convinced! will add grocery this week!
          thanks

          • leiiv on 25/05/2023 - 08:56

            @ddvkid: Btw, do you have a trick to crawl Woolworth website? Because pricehipster don't do Woolworth anymore because of the bot blocking or something like that I think.

        • Associatedddvkid @ Buy Wisely on 25/05/2023 - 00:30

          Silly question, do grocery prices vary between cities or even suburbs at coles and woolworths?

          • leiiv on 25/05/2023 - 08:53

            @ddvkid: Ah yes forgot about it. I think the weekly specials for some products vary between states :( And that's excluding the smaller express etc stores.

            • Associatedddvkid @ Buy Wisely on 25/05/2023 - 10:07

              @leiiv: technically I can display items based on the user's IP address, need to upgrade my server again :(
              let me have a play, thanks

  • cpool on 25/05/2023 - 13:04

    I'm quite impressed. I found it to be quick to search. I would love a feature that allowed me to refresh the pricing if I'm viewing an item. I searched for an item and saw it for $159 and when I clicked through it was $199. The retailer has obviously updated the price earlier today.

    I also noticed that for this item Amazon was not listed. I searched Amazon and could see that they were out of stock of the item. So perhaps this is why they were not listed. I think it could be interesting to list other retailers that normally have the item, esp. so I can see price history, even if that retailer doesn't have stock today. I might decide. Oh wow - when Retailer X have it in stock, it's always Y% cheaper, so I'll wait until it is back in stock again.

    Great website so far!

    • Associatedddvkid @ Buy Wisely on 25/05/2023 - 13:16

      Thanks for the kind words, it means a lot to me :)
      Adding the out of stock items to the price history is totally doable, will prioritise it early next week :)

  • Associatedddvkid @ Buy Wisely on 19/06/2023 - 20:45
    +1

    Thank you all for the valuable feedback! Based on your input, I have made the following improvements:

    • The search functionality has been completely rewritten.
    • A grocery category has been added (only for coles and woolies)
  • Techie4066 on 25/06/2023 - 21:42

    Just want to say I love your website and will be relying on it a lot. It even tracked an Amazon item that Camelcamelcamel hasn't for 3 months. Hope Woolies won't end up treating you like they did Price Hipster! Perhaps you could safeguard against being blocked.

    I just did some testing and found a more niche product like these only stocked on Amazon don't appear on your website. I guess it would be a mammoth job that 3xcamels serves to track every single product.

    • Associatedddvkid @ Buy Wisely on 26/06/2023 - 20:38
      +1

      I'm so glad to hear that you love it! It is the power that enables me to work until midnight every day after my full-time job.

      You're right, collecting data for every product is not quite feasible, but each week I analyse the search results and add products based on them. So, it's very likely that any missing products you searched for will appear on my website within a week.

      • Techie4066 on 13/07/2023 - 21:00

        Hi again, looks like there was an issue with searches throwing a 404 a couple days ago so thanks for fixing that. I'd like to echo some previous complaints by pointing out that search results aren't quite there yet in terms of sorting by relevance, and showing results that match most of the search terms. For example I looked up "Oreo" and it threw me a bunch of random results to wade through, which I've seen in other search results too. Maybe websites like Etsy don't need to be indexed? Not sure, just throwing ideas out there. There are also some random variants of products eg. unusual volumes of Listerine bottles which fragment the search results but can be toggled between each other in one product page, which is a bit confusing and makes it more time consuming to check all prices. Thanks for your work, it was so so resourceful for me buying groceries during Prime Day.

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