An Australian CamelCamelCamel/Price Tracker site?

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  sane on 07/12/2012 - 14:10

  In the way camel3 has amazon|3rd party|used options, you need to include the major overseas sellers as an option to include. Would need to include exchange rate and delivery charges.

  If you want publicity, and to annoy Gerry Harvey, you could do with an "Aussie Overcharging Index" which measures the omnibus level of overcharging by Oz retailers. Ideal fodder for TV programs.

  As a sop to Oz retailers, offer a "Price Competitive" label that stores could include on product pages, where a rosette would appear if the price offered were competitive on the global market, and disappear if not.

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    zhenjie on 07/12/2012 - 14:17

    I like the idea of a comparison between local and overseas prices, although probably not the focus of this site as its main operation will be price tracking/history rather then comparison.

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      sane on 07/12/2012 - 15:22

      I think you'd find it would be illuminating.

      I think what happens it that the launch price of goods between Oz and the global norm isn't usually too different, but that globally the price then trends downwards over time, whilst the price in Oz stays resolutely high. In other words its a lazy retailer, competition problem.

      BTW Don't neglect the issues of how to get publicity and how to exit the work - they are key.

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  _Bruce_ on 07/12/2012 - 14:15

  I think the problem is that Australia doesn't have services like Amazon. I would however like a tool to filter Amazon for things that really do ship to Australia, as their page is terrible for this and you often have to go through shipping options to find out. Maybe this exists?

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    scotty on 07/12/2012 - 14:20

    Indeed that would be a lot more useful if Amazon is able to support that.

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      neil on 07/12/2012 - 14:25

      There used to be a website that would list all products from Amazon that could be shipped to Australia. Can't remember the URL…anyone?

      EDIT: These guys

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    zhenjie on 07/12/2012 - 17:18

    If there is a viable way to detect what products are shippable to Australia I'll look at getting this done.

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  ProspectiveDarkness on 07/12/2012 - 14:31

  I know it's not an Australian site, specifically, but IMO Steam would be a great inclusion.

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  mraedge on 25/08/2015 - 09:53

  Did you ever continue development of this tool?
  It has occurred to me that a few online retailers in Australia are very difficult to "catch" bargains with, due to their "non-discount" policies and also stocking products only they sell. Bunnings is one such outlet.

  A process like Google's Webmaster Tools Data Highlighter, could allow users to identify a price on ANY website's product page and return regularly to check for changes and to notify an account holder when they occur. The database would need to record the current price and also perhaps 50 characters of source html before and after the price in the source code to mark the "spot" where the price can be retrieved in future.

  The price location process could be simplified by the user providing a product page URL AND quoting the current price. Thus potentially giving the tool enough to go on. Alerts could also be generated when a product is no longer found, the page code has changed and a price can no longer be identified (prompting the user to reactivate the listing by identifying the price once again). If a pattern can be established per domain, template changes and re-connections could soon be adopted for all entries saved for that site (for the entire user-base).

  Actually, once users have set some sample product data for ANY website, the system could soon index ALL products on that website and start logging historical price changes…. wait a minute. I think I just figured out Google's long game.