First of all, let me give a big thanks to Danilo @ ShoppingSquare for sponsoring OzBargain’s weekly competition for the next few weeks. We have been running our weekly comps since February 2007, and has given out thousands of dollars so far. From this Thursday onwards (4 June 2009), instead of getting our regular $20 [...]

We love social networks. September 2007. OzBargain released its Facebook application to let you see the latest deals posted on OzBargain from inside Facebook. In August 2008 I created the OzBargain page on Facebook and ran our birthday competition pretty much on Facebook… May 3rd 2009. We have finally reached 500 fans! Yes it took a while, [...]

Last week Vikas sent an email to me sometime late in the afternoon… I am currently with OptusNet and every-time I type in your website OzBargain, it goes to eBay… Have you done something? Yes I know sometimes I uploaded half-baked scripts onto OzBargain which caused all kinds of mess, but seriously I have not been able [...]

There are several reasons why a post on OzBargain gets unpublished, i.e. in a state that only the original poster and moderator can see, and will be automatically purged from the database if not being republished after 90 days. For example, It’s a duplicate of an old post. It’s violating our terms and services It’s spammy Someone else requested [...]

It has got to be one of the easiest competition on OzBargain so far — just guess a number and you could win a Microsoft Explorer Mouse with BlueTrack Technology. It’s so easy that some actually forgot to take out their calculators. What Kingwang26 said in the comment was actually very correct — the hints [...]

One of my first Christmas presents last year was from Deeps at Microsoft Australia, whom I’ve worked together to create the IE8 Web Slice for OzBargain. It’s the Microsoft Explorer Mouse with BlueTrack technology that works on “any service surface”. Easy Recharging Reliable Wireless on the go Sophisticated design and comfort Go anywhere Retail for ~$99 from MSY And guess what [...]

Ops. I meant to post about it like two weeks ago, but anyway. It’s better be late than never… Happy New Year, OzBargain! I have actually been back to work for a week, although I have been a bit lazy getting back to work on OzBargain (as you can see my lack of participation on the site). [...]

OzBargain was launched back in November 2006, which means we are almost 2 years old! For the last 2 years, our community members have posted: 6,200+ deals 600+ forum discussion threads 26,000+ comments Thank you all who have participated! Last week I have also posted in the OzBargain forums — OzBargain Birthday Competition, where I am giving away [...]

I posted this new competition at OzBargain yesterday. Basically this is what happened. Monday evening I received an email from Chang at Yogee, a Sydney based online toys & games store and a regular at OzBargain. OzBargain has been bringing many new business to him so he wants to thank OzBargain by offering additional prizes to [...]

No one asked for it but I have just implemented a small feature on OzBargain that I think would be very useful for store owners — full RSS feed on deals and comments posted on OzBargain, against the domain name of your store. I think it will be very valuable for store owners/representatives to keep [...]

Every now and then someone would want sell something on OzBargain. I have been hesitated to create a market place on OzBargain, because Work work work! To have a “proper” market place for people to trade and swap, I need to do more coding. But I am still struggling to squeeze time to implement features that [...]

Just saw that both OzBargain and MoneyBackCo have been featured on Sydney Morning Herald, under the Money Section — A click away from bargain bliss. Coupons OzBargain (www.ozbargain.com.au) started as the personal blog of Scott Yang in 2005 and has grown into a community of people who post discount coupons found online and in print. [...]

Back in May this year ozpete raised an issue in the forums regarding to on-going deals, as some deals/coupons don’t really expire and are still very useful after a year or two. However due to the design of OzBargain where new items push the older ones away from the front page, those older deals somehow [...]

It has been more than a month since my previous post — yes I know that I have been slack blogging here. Well, there are quite a few reasons — I have been sick (seriously ill with virus infection), and busy, and generally unmotivated. Anyway. It has been a hiatus but I am back now! [...]

Thanks to shosho who pointed out in this thread, OzBargain has just been named as Website Of The Week by Anthill, an magazine for the small business and start ups. The average bargain is usually only valid for a few days, but there are enough posted on OzBargain every day to keep you coming back. [...]

I am on holidays on the Gold Coast this week so you probably won’t see me much on OzBargain. I am still trying to check out the site every now and then just in case there’s a riot happening :) This evening I actually managed to create a Facebook Business Page for OzBargain. So now [...]

OzBargain has just received its very first legal threat! This is what happened. Yesterday (23 April) at around mid-day I received an email from a “Senior Project Administrator” of a construction company (that shall remain nameless for now). The subject says “Your posters on our <construction site>” (somewhere in Sydney CBD). To paraphrase the email [...]

A new feature that has been added to OzBargain over the last couple of days — Store Representatives. Basically there are two types of people posting on OzBargain – Consumers/bargain hunters/cheapos who have found a bargain. Merchants/shop owners/service providers who want to promote their own products or services. In order for us to correctly identify members from category [...]

TechCrunch reports Alexa has overhauled its ranking system to use more sources than just its toolbars. There has been big shifts in the Blogosphere where many webmaster-centric blogs suffer a dip. On the other hand, many sites that are not Internet/web design-related actually get a boost in Alexa ranking. For example yesterday OzBargain was [...]

AdToll is a relatively new ad brokering/ad serving company, where website publishers can rent out advertising spaces, and advertisers can rent them for a fixed weekly price. I was interested in them because (1) I run websites with advertisement space that I would like to rent out (2) they are Australian based start up, based [...]

Okay. Enough is enough. I have spent 15-30 minutes today fixing up issues that shouldn’t had been there in the first place. Why do people keep on registering an user account on OzBargain, thinking that they are actually registering an account on the merchant’s site?! Ain’t that big OzBargain at the top-left corner obvious enough?! [...]

I have just saw the new Feedburner stats on the number of subscribers at OzBargain — 1,000!!! The means for every single day, there are 1,000 individuals checking out the latest deals posted at OzBargain via either an online RSS reader (Google Reader, Bloglines, etc), an offline RSS reader (FeedDemon or Firefox’s own RSS bookmarks), [...]

OzBargain has long been able to list deals from a specific domain — just add the domain name after http://www.ozbargain.com.au/deals/! For example: Deals Direct deals www.ozbargain.com.au/deals/dealsdirect.com.au OO.com.au deals www.ozbargain.com.au/deals/oo.com.au ShoppingSquare deals www.ozbargain.com.au/deals/shoppingsquare.com.au Moreover, you can append /feed at the end of URL to get the RSS feed for all the deals from that particular domain! It is very useful to keep track [...]

Just in case you have not noticed a little new feature on the front page of OzBargain, I have created a little sidebar-item Top Users, showing the top contributors on this collaborative bargain hunting website. OzBargain has been getting many great contributors over the last 14 months and I thought it would be a nice [...]

Last night, Neill @ Melbourne Metblogs asked on OzBargain about opening deals in a new window. He also asked: Also, surely OZbargain has grown enough to be out of beta? OzBargain has been sitting on beta release for as long as it has been alive. It has gone through regular updates and I consider that it [...]

Happy New Year everyone! How is your Christmas/New Year holidays? For me it is a matter of staying at home, playing with kids, enjoying the family time and not doing anything (including blogging and updating my websites). Life will hopefully get back to normal tomorrow when I head back to work, and I will hopefully [...]

Oz Bargain Blog started its life almost 2 and half years ago, and has been on the domain, OzBargainBlog.com, since April 2006. At the beginning it was hosted on my home server off my ADSL connection, moved to off-shore budget hosting as the hard disk of my home server crashed, moved back to a [...]

Alissa sent me her site to have a look at. She ran a site listing free samples in USA and Australia — FreeSamplesDirect.com, where you can get listing of free product samples. The site has a blog with new entries when the site gets updated, and RSS feed for those who wish to keep [...]

I am totally flattered when I learnt that OzBargain was mentioned on the BRAN podcast. BRAN is a like TWiT for the Australians, where three journalists Roulla Yiacoumi, Angus Kidman and Nathan Taylor chatted about the big tech news of the week. The only person that I actually recognise is Angus as I have [...]

Last week I posted a question on OzBargain forums asking for opinions on social networking sites. Everyone ignored me so I guess I have figured out the general opinion on this matter :) Nevertheless, I love social networking sites and had spent my last 1-2 weeks getting OzBargain onto Facebook using their developer API. Hopefully [...]

It has been a slow blogging week — sorry I have not written anything here for the paste week. Regular readers should know where all the new bargains are posted anyway. Personally I have also been spending more time running the OzBargain site than actual blogging here. I am a software developer after all and [...]

Last week we had OzBargain on Twitter. Maybe this whole “Web 2.0″ thing is just too “out there”. This week, our mate MiCCAS.net has created a Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget for OzBargain — something you can run inside your desktop, and it will grab the latest deals on OzBargain and display on your side [...]

Being someone who is still “trying” to understand Web 2.0, I thought the easiest way is just to use what is cool and hip out there. After the South by South West earlier this year, it appears the hippest app that everyone ought to try out is Twitter, the Ruby on Rails powered micro-blogging [...]

Seriously, I have been asked by shops and websites in Australia to talk about their sites every other day here. Sorry to those whom I have not been able to reply, as it is not really my policy of reviewing every sites that come through my inbox. I do have some advertisement space though (banner [...]

Steve of MoneyBacoCo wrote on the OzBargain Forums, We’ve finished! The website upgrade. Additionally we’ve reduced the cashout fee from 2.7% to just 20c, and you can now choose a direct bank transfer rather than being limited to just PayPal, you can add a bank account and change your “Payment to” in your preferences (see the [...]

A typical bargain hunting execution loop: Lock into product. Go to as many price comparison site as possible. Find the vendor offering the cheapest price. Buy from that vendor. It is done in the way that “price” becomes the only determining factor, whereas the quality of service provided by the supplier/vendor is rarely added into the formulae. However, we usually [...]

It has been a busy week at OzBargain! Many deals have been posted and big thanks to all who have contributed! I myself has also been busy. Our second daughter was born 2 weeks ago and I am now waking up 4 times each night :( Worse, the in-laws are here from overseas so we [...]

You might have noticed that over the past few weeks, MoneyBackCo, whom I have reviewed 1 1/2 month ago, has been having a banner advertisement at the right-hand sidebar of this website. I am here to announce today that MoneyBackCo, Australia’s moneyback reward community, is now more than just a sponsor of OzBargain Blog. [...]

Just in case you have missed, OzBargain is going to run regular competitions every week. Our last two runs had great results, and I am hoping to have something similar running every week. Let’s make it a habit :) So from now on, every Thursday at 12:00pm mid-day, I will draw two winners from those who [...]

News flash! Just arrived in the mail! Someone contacted me using our contact form, and this is what he has written: Dear sir,I need 40 Pcs of “Dell 6400 inspiron- core 2 duo-120 Gb hard…”. what is your last price fot [sic] this order?We are laptop trader in IRAN. hope we have a good business.Regards,Ali [last [...]

Wow. Lots of contributions last night. Thank you everyone! Let me try to summarise the hot bargains submitted over the last week. Woolworth Drought Relief has so far received the most vote. On 23rd January (i.e. TODAY!), Woolworth/Safeway is going to donate their profit of the entire day to the drought relief found to aid [...]

Ozpete reminded me that “not all bargains are on the Internet”. Indeed. I am not a shopping mall kind of person, but everytime I visit one I know where the bargains are — where crowds of bargain hunters digging into shelves of marked down items. Oops. That scene does not have an URL attached to [...]

I have just announced our second competition, which will be running from today (3 Jan) for 3 weeks (until 23 Jan). Here’s the summary version: Post a deal, and you’ll get a chance to win, up to 5 entries. 1x$50 and 5x$20 Deals Direct vouchers to be won. Deals Direct will actually sponsor this competition by match the [...]

Yes! Last day at work for the year 2006. I will be taking three days off next week + 4 more days the week after. New posts here will be more sparse while I am in the “holiday mood”. Meanwhile, there are only 12 more hours to go to contribute your bargain findings on OzBargain, to [...]

Here’s my “incentive” to get more of you to share deals, vouchers and bargain tips — First Ever OzBargain Competition!! These are the prizes that I am giving away: 1x AUD$50 voucher 5x AUD$20 voucher I have not really got those vouchers yet — so the winner can decide on what he/she wants to get. Currently it is [...]

Just let me blow my own trumpet here. I am here officially launching OzBargain.com.au, one of my “other” websites in development. It’s been in development over the last month, and some strange voice tells me that it is now ready to see the public. Do note that little green “Beta” at the top of [...]