Mild Surprise - Australian Retail Price Tracker

AssociatedGecko @ Mild Surprise on 28/12/2012 - 14:36

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.

http://mildsurprise.com/

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 :)

General Discussion

Related Stores

Mild Surprise
Mild Surprise

Comments

  • neil on 28/12/2012 - 14:48
    +1

    Great site. I guess I'd like to see it go the direction of Camelx3.

    • Enter a URL of item to get price history
    • Notification of price changes via email.
    • Images next to product names. (e.g. Studymate Plastic Wedge Sharpener, Double Hole, what the heck is that?)
    • The date you have is 12-26 but isn't the latest update from today?
    • What's a surprise score?
    • Product categories
    • inoxlc on 28/12/2012 - 16:15

      I second this, something like camelx3 would be great. Also maybe searching products that way we will get a snapshot across different vendors

      edit: forgot to mention that you guys are doing a great job, keep it up

  • scrimshaw on 28/12/2012 - 15:01

    How about computer shops like MSY, UMART and PCCG? Is that hard to integrate?

    • AssociatedGecko @ Mild Surprise on 28/12/2012 - 15:08
      +1

      Yeah omgomgomgomg, the other guy in this whole operation is working on a newer backend setup that will allow us to scrape all the different websites in Australia you could think of using distrubted crawling over Amazons elastic cloud stuff!

      • scotty on 28/12/2012 - 15:59
        +2

        I 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 :)

  • alwaysis on 28/12/2012 - 19:11

    Looks great… just picked up a scientific calculator that I had to get for my daughter from officeworks thanks

  • m0nkeycheese on 28/12/2012 - 21:37
    +1

    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

    • AssociatedGecko @ Mild Surprise on 28/12/2012 - 22:10
      +4

      Working on it now!

      • m0nkeycheese on 28/12/2012 - 22:45
        +1

        Maaaaaddd!

      • daver on 29/12/2012 - 00:29
        +1

        Great concept and good luck

  • bargained on 29/12/2012 - 00:25

    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….

    • AssociatedGecko @ Mild Surprise on 29/12/2012 - 00:26

      Yeah we have a few ideas on how to set out the information, it's all about getting around to it at the moment - thanks for your comments though! We're considering every piece of feedback given right now.

      • bargained on 29/12/2012 - 22:02

        Cool, and what about selecting categories? Not really interested in the fact the pencil sharpener is on special…

        • BuyoTheCat on 09/01/2013 - 16:21

          is pencil sharpener a Photoshop plugin?

  • AssociatedGecko @ Mild Surprise on 29/12/2012 - 17:13

    Hey everyone, big new update!

    • Search
    • Accounts
    • Item Watching (Go to the items page and watch an item!)
    • bargained on 29/12/2012 - 22:06

      Great!. Any chance the search results can have the discount %-ages and the sorting enabled?

  • Coops1 on 29/12/2012 - 19:09

    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 :(

    • neil on 29/12/2012 - 19:17

      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 ;).

  • bargained on 29/12/2012 - 22:07

    What is the formula behind the surprise score?

    • AssociatedGecko @ Mild Surprise on 31/12/2012 - 10:56

      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.

      • bargained on 31/12/2012 - 22:07
        +1

        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 - 22:08

    God start. It would be good if an online store could add its own feed to the site as well.

    • m0nkeycheese on 29/12/2012 - 23:27
      +2

      No way then it would just be spam. Plus that's what ozbargain is for

      • bargained on 30/12/2012 - 10:53

        It would be a price comparison, not spam.

  • jmes on 30/12/2012 - 22:25

    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.

  • bargained on 01/01/2013 - 13:51

    I can't seem to do a search on 3d tv 60"
    3d works
    3d tv works
    3d tv 60" doesn't give me any results?
    I see many listed when I do a search for 3d tv only

    • AssociatedGecko @ Mild Surprise on 01/01/2013 - 13:57

      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!

    • [Deactivated] on 04/01/2013 - 15:16

      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.

      • retiredfeline on 05/01/2013 - 13:02

        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.

  • AssociatedGecko @ Mild Surprise on 02/01/2013 - 09:14

    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.

  • bargained on 03/01/2013 - 12:57

    Are your charts correct?
    Jan 13 Apr 13 Jul 13 Oct 13
    Predicting the price?

    • AssociatedGecko @ Mild Surprise on 03/01/2013 - 14:24

      Hehe, yeah I've got a flu right now and can't really focus on much for more than a minute at a time.. Will look at this millenium+13 bug sometime this weekend!

  • ozdesi on 03/01/2013 - 15:46

    great effort Gecko

  • [Deactivated] on 04/01/2013 - 12:31
    +1

    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 598.00

    Same 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 696.00

    Dodgy much?

    This is the best website I have seen in ages. Thank you so much.

    • berger on 04/01/2013 - 21:48

      Not sure how it's dodgy. Promotion pricing, every company does it…

    • AssociatedGecko @ Mild Surprise on 04/01/2013 - 21:48

      Seeing some of the price rises in the week before Christmas was enough to make me cry. It really opens my eyes up - I hope the website spreads such that retailers know they can't get away with big price rises during high-volume purchase periods.

      • scotty on 04/01/2013 - 22:54
        +1

        And hopefully your bots are stealthy enough so they don't get blocked by the retailers!

        • chipstss on 05/01/2013 - 19:25

          Yea, and robots.txt can eat a #!*@

        • AssociatedGecko @ Mild Surprise on 05/01/2013 - 23:07
          +1

          Have you seen their robots.txt? They have nothing about intervals on their websites, we'd follow their recommendation if they had one.

        • chipstss on 07/01/2013 - 21:43

          You're not selling anything or making money (I think) so who cares if you don't obey robots.txt

        • Janko on 02/01/2014 - 16:33

          I'm very surprised some of your retailers don't even explicitly ban scraping in their T&C. Probably hard to when they're probably scraping their competitors' sites themselves.

  • ozshaz on 04/01/2013 - 22:39
    +1

    Another suggestion would be to add "forget Password" option on the login page to reset the password !!

  • kabigon on 05/01/2013 - 07:52
    +1

    This will be handy next time JB has another 20% off DVDs etc. sale seeing how they don't like to list explicitly when a price has actually been changed, it'll probably make the page very long though :)

    • driew on 09/01/2013 - 12:41

      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.

    • kabigon on 10/01/2013 - 10:18

      Just checked, seems Mild Surprise doesn't track DVDs etc.? Oh well..

  • [Deactivated] on 09/01/2013 - 14:20
    +1

    just been thinking about this, have you thought of putting coles and woolworths in there?

    Sure the tech stuff is great for the big buys, but its the small ones that end up saving a lot more money in the long run.

    Thanks again guys.

    • neil on 09/01/2013 - 14:44

      I guess they have their weekly specials but do supermarkets change their prices daily? Does the price on their website (Coles,Woolworths) reflect the same price in store?

      • [Deactivated] on 09/01/2013 - 15:00

        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…

        • AssociatedGecko @ Mild Surprise on 09/01/2013 - 15:16

          We've got a really good idea for coles and woolworths. Stay tuned.

        • neil on 09/01/2013 - 15:25

          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.

      • kabigon on 09/01/2013 - 16:39

        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.. :)

        • leiiv on 17/01/2013 - 11:49

          Can we try crowdsourcing?

  • T_double_U on 17/01/2013 - 01:01

    Gecko could i suggest adding Dan Murphy's?

  • ComfortablyNumb on 17/01/2013 - 12:53

    Haha, love the name

  • leiiv on 23/01/2013 - 11:14

    What about BigW and Dicksmith?

  • neil on 23/01/2013 - 11:25

    Is this still being updated? I only see recent Officeworks updates. Last JB update was on the 18th, HN on the 17th.

    • AssociatedGecko @ Mild Surprise on 24/01/2013 - 12:06

      There are no errors on HN or JB scrapers and it is scraping prices properly, so I'd say they are just settling down after Christmas now.

  • berger on 28/08/2013 - 10:09

    Is this thing still working? site looks very quiet..

    • scotty on 28/08/2013 - 12:51

      Very quiet indeed. We have been linking to PriceSlice these days for price history.

      • berger on 28/08/2013 - 13:09

        cheers!

        • AssociatedGecko @ Mild Surprise on 28/08/2013 - 14:48
          +1

          Yes, very quiet.

          A little update as to our current dealings. We have formed a proprietary limited company, hired a business manager and have been working mostly secretly on a beta site for the last two months.

          We took a step back and tried maintaining the current site. It was not scalable. It was wasteful. The code was running on a backend that could not be sustained properly.

          I won't give any hint as to 'how long', we want this release to be professional. Very much unlike our current website. We are working very hard on getting our codebase functional and stable so we don't release with a pile of bugs. Now that it is a business we will not be running the untidy and unprofessional way the current site was.

          As an aside to this, we wish to have our price researching running for some time before releasing to the public - there is not a lot of point in half-doing it and releasing with no price history.

  • AssociatedGecko @ Mild Surprise on 25/11/2013 - 15:58

    Hi everyone,

    Some good news!

    We've released a public beta of the new site :)

    We now keep price history for Big W, Officeworks, JB HiFi Online, Dick Smith, Anaconda and Harvey Norman. We're going to attempt to keep bumping up the number of stores, so keep an eye out for new availability!

    If you go to the http://mildsurprise.com website and click in the banner - or use the direct link of http://play.mildsurprise.com/ you'll be able to see the latest updates.

    Our coolest new feature that I love is the tag adding!

    Go ahead and try type 'Apple iPad' - it'll split it into two tags, Apple and iPad. These filter results out for you automatically!

    Click a Store Logo and it'll filter out items that come from those stores!

    And if you have any issues, at all, leave me a message either here in the forums or in private message.

    • Riczter on 25/11/2013 - 16:01

      Awesome!! Shouldn't the down arrows be green?

      • AssociatedGecko @ Mild Surprise on 25/11/2013 - 16:04

        If you've got suggestions, let me know! We've slaved over rewriting everything from scratch the last few months, and we can add more stores to collate history for quite easily now!

        • Riczter on 25/11/2013 - 16:06

          Are you looking for suggestions on more stores? If so I'll give you a list of the ones worth keeping an eye on? Also you need a logo! Ask ozBargain, im sure someone in the community will design you one for free. Otherwise try that designcrowd website.

        • AssociatedGecko @ Mild Surprise on 25/11/2013 - 16:08

          Throw any and all suggestions forward (including store suggestions)! We have a list of stores to come right now, but the list is very much capable of change if better suggestions come up.

        • Riczter on 25/11/2013 - 16:12
          +1

          The Good Guys
          Bing Lee
          Flingshot
          PLE
          Kogan
          MLN
          MSY (not sure how much luck you'll have scraping pricing from MSY, their website, inexplicably, is STILL an absolute joke.

        • roughana on 25/11/2013 - 18:08
          +1

          Priceline
          Chemist Warehouse
          Woolworths
          Coles
          IGA

        • T_double_U on 02/01/2014 - 16:50

          Dan Murphy's would be pretty handy.

  • AssociatedGecko @ Mild Surprise on 25/12/2013 - 19:39
    +2

    Didn't want to appear spammy by submitting a deal over this, but check out all the huge price drops in the last 24 hours!! Go to http://mildsurprise.com and select the time period as Last 24 Hours and sort by Price Drops!

    Some crazy deals in there if you're after a new TV.

    Specifically I found these couple:
    Yamaha HTR-3066B - $247 - Never been this low in price, has half a gazillion different inputs and does 3D/4k HDMI passthrough..
    http://mildsurprise.com/i/Yamaha-HTR-3066B-5-1-Channel-AV-Re…

    Xbox 360 320gb hard drive - $69 - I only just spent $120 on this last week!
    http://mildsurprise.com/i/Xbox-360-320gb-Media-Hard-Drive/66…

    G27 is back to reasonable prices at $265…
    http://mildsurprise.com/i/Logitech-G27-Racing-Wheel-for-PC-a…

    Just be wary, some of the other things listed there are items the stores have jacked up in price just before christmas so they can have huge discounts.. Like all the Logitech stuff that dick smith has on 'sale'…

  • matt_will_fix_it on 02/01/2014 - 15:49

    What happened with tracking the prices for Officeworks & Harvey Norman? I can't see those on the site any more.

  • matt_will_fix_it on 10/02/2014 - 15:27
    -1

    Looks like the price tracking for anaconda isn't working. Shows different prices on the two websites…

    eg

    $599 http://www.mildsurprise.com/item.php?i=200861210752785472218…
    $389 http://www.anaconda.com.au/Product/Bikes-and-Accessories/Bik…

  • matt_will_fix_it on 25/03/2014 - 10:25

    Would also be good to track appliances online

  • ozshaz on 01/10/2014 - 21:33

    Is the website up and running ? Tired just now and no luck.

    • KayDat on 06/11/2014 - 16:01

      Looks like it's gone down =[

      • matt_will_fix_it on 06/11/2014 - 16:02
        +1

        Thats a mild surprise…

        • neil on 06/11/2014 - 16:18

          Both mildsurprise and priceslice have shut down. Pretty disappointing.

          NZ has a cool service, PriceSpy which combines price drops as well as price comparison. Hopefully, we'll get something similar.

        • matt_will_fix_it on 06/11/2014 - 16:25

          @neil:

          Maybe ozprice.com.au ?

        • neil on 06/11/2014 - 16:29

          @matt_will_fix_it:

          Ha. Um nope.

          There are plenty of price comparison sites but haven't seen any sites that track prices like Camelx3 or Pricespy.

        • scotty on 06/11/2014 - 18:21

          @matt_will_fix_it: Interestingly PriceSpy is a Swedish company — they could have launch a similar service here in Australia.

          @neil: Guys at ShopBot said that they might be able to offer us this sometime next year. Finger crossed.

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