One Shopping Cart, One Account, Many Merchants, Thousands of Products… BIGshop.com.au is Australia’s One Stop Shop, a place where merchants and consumers meet and transact. On BIGshop.com.au you can shop from many merchants for thousands of products with one shopping cart and in one simple transaction. It is the quick and convenient way to shop. Furthermore, all our merchants are reputable Australian businesses who have passed our strict screening process, ensuring a safe shopping environment for all our BIGshop shoppers.

Having a shopping mall to host all the affiliated merchants is not a unique idea (think eBay and Amazon). BIGshop.com.au seems to be a late starter in this arena, although it is still not hugely populated in Australia. Are they as good as they claimed to be?

Shoppers Perspective

There are two shopping malls close to where I live (Sydney South/Eastern suburbs) — Eastlake shopping centre and Westfield Eastgardens. There are something I like about Eastlake — things are generally cheaper there. Aldi is there, and Woolies there always have specials. However if my family is going for a shopping trip, we will head over to Eastgardens for sure. Eastgardens is simply bigger, cleaner, brighter, having heaps more shops, and generally providing a better shopping experience. At the end price along is not the answer for everything.

So when you look at an online shopping mall, you gotta ask — how many shops are there, and how many products are they selling? The answers to these questions are directly related to how good a shopping experience would be.

From BIGshop’s shop directory, there are currently 13 shops, ranging from white goods, gadgets, perfumes, and even just ties and cuffs. Although not a lot, but there are usually more than one shops competition in the same category.

Instead of having confusing interface from shop to shop, all shops under BIGshop.com.au have the same easy-to-use interface, which is a good thing. Take Are-Jays for example — which one would you prefer, BIGshop.com.au’s shop-front, or their own shopping-cart?

Note — I am not having a go at Are-Jays — I think they are a great shop providing gadgets at great price. I am simply saying, BIGshop.com.au is doing a good job at aggregating the products from Are-Jays’ own website. Although it also runs the risk of loosing individual shop’s identify, as the only thing that’s unique between shops is a small shop logo at the top-left hand corner.

To find an item you wish to buy is also easy. The search box at the top allows you to search a product from entire site, from a specific merchant, or from a specific category. Say if I wish to buy an 30GB iPod, and found it on Are-Jays’:

Again you landed in BIGshop’s interface, where it clearly shown a product image, price of the product, cost for delivery and availability. There are a few other things that you can do to communicate with (1) other shoppers (2) BIGshop.com.au, and (3) Are-Jays.

• You can write a product review, which will be included under this product for all other shoppers to see.
• You can ask merchant a question.
• You can add this product to your BIGshop-wide wish list.

These features are certainly making BIGshop moving into Amazon’s direction, which is a good thing. I think part of Amazon’s success (besides good price and large range of products) is its interactivity with the merchants and other shoppers.

Well done!

Merchants Perspective

So for now, I think for BIGshop.com.au to be successful, it needs more merchants to sign up. Why should the merchants signing up to BIGshop.com.au? From its Sell on BIGshop.com.au page:

5 Reasons why you should be selling on BIGshop

1. Receive Paid Orders – We deliver paid orders directly to you
2. Pay-Per-Order – You only pay us when you make a sale
3. New Customers – Reach customers you would not have otherwise reached through your own website or offline business
4. Brand Building – Build your brand through your Bshop
5. Ease of Use – We provide you with the tools to leverage your existing e-commerce software and fully integrate it into BIGshop.

Basically, they will do the advertisement/selling/tracking for you, and you will only need to pay BIGshop per order. They have a sophisticated infrastructure that can integrate inventory and order data with merchant’s own website, and it seems they are supporting osCommerce and ZenCart, two of the most popular Open Source online shopping cart software.

Advertisement is also something that is beyond the scope of most online shops — how do you compete on direct or organic traffic with other big players who have heavy investment on search engine optimisation? I have seen BIGshop.com.au advertised on PPC and text-link-ads networks (actually, they have also bought a link on my other website) — it is something that many shop would not venture into.

Now, talking about the fees. I have no clue what so ever on how much BIGshop.com.au is charging the merchants, although I think it would need to be more attractive than merchants running their own ads. As you can get 3.5% back from MoneyBackCo, I think it would charge no less than that from the merchants.

There is also a merchant requirement on the BIGshop’s site. It is good to know that not every average joe can sign up as a merchant — they are free to go back to eBay :) They are certainly guarding for the shoppers as well as their own reputation.

Conclusion

I have just added BIGshop.com.au to my list of shops that I will visit when I need to buy anything online, because it is actually quite a good Australian shopping site. It is also nice to write a conclusion with a positive tone, which I won’t say from my past sponsored reviews.

As BIGshop.com.au has just started up, I am hoping to see more merchants there. Maybe it will be the Amazon for the Aussies. Maybe.

dealighted is a selection of today’s best deals + many deal forums combined into one.

Under its nice and clean user interface, it is actually two different sites. You have a deals aggregator that analyses forum threads in major deal forums, and you also get a price comparison website that is actually powered by ResellerRatings and Shopping.com.

Honestly, Dealighted has actually been under the spotlight over the last couple of days as the owner went on ReviewMe shopping spree and got the heavy weights like John Chow and Jeremy Shoemaker to review it. Although I reckon Yan from ProBargainHunter.com has probably done the most comprehensive review for this site. I’ll see how mine goes :)

Deals Aggregator

When you knock on Dealighted’s front door, what welcomes you will be its deals aggregator.

It is not the typical feed aggregator that dumps every link back to you. Instead, it analyses most recent threads from 6 different forums over 4 sites (Anantech Hot Deals, FatWallet, GottaDeal and SlickDeals), and only spills out the ones that it finds “interesting”. For example, currently it says:

dealighted analyzed
496 new deal forum threads today and identified 113 that people really like.

Now, how does Dealighted figured out that some deal threads people like, and some people don’t? There are a few determining factors that are presented on that aggregated result —

1. how recent the thread is,
2. how many people have replied to the original thread, and
3. how many people have viewed the thread

All these three attributes are probably scrapped off the forums. Then Dealighted’s secret recipes are applied to these threads and working out which deal threads have enough “scores” to be promoted to the front page. It is a bit like Digg or Digg-like social bargain hunting sites (DealsPlus, Dealigg for example), except all the posting and voting are done off site! What Dealighted does is simply aggregated them into a single listing.

I can imagine that this part of Dealighted is all fully automated. Dealighted relies on the fact that all the hard work spent on other partnering forum sites, and it only needs to present analysed result to its own readers, showing only the best deals. You can also use the search box to find old discussions on a specific product you are looking for. How good is that?!

Except it does not really work for me. There are a few issues with Dealighted’s aggregator that hinders its usefulness.

• Flat list without categories or folkonomy/tags makes browsing much harder. There is a “tag cloud”, but it is in fact just weighted list of query keywords.
• No RSS feed for “Today’s Best User Submitted Deals”. I thought every single site has RSS feed these days.
• Deal listing with only title + link feels a bit lacking. Users will be more inclined to click through if product image and/or thread excerpt are included.
• Why login and add comment on Dealighted, when you could participate in a more lively discussion on the actual deal thread?

Conclusion: It is not bad as an automated service, but not as useful as it seems.

Price Comparison

If you click on the gadget images at top, or use the search box that says “What are you shopping for”, you will be brought to Dealighted’s price comparison site.

The price comparison site lets you see the product images, as well as listing all the merchants selling this specific model, from cheapest to most expensive. You can then click through and buy from the merchant of your choice.

Price comparison part of Dealighted does look like a completely separate site from its deal aggregating side. In fact it is powered by ResellerRatings.com, which is owned by the same person who started Dealighted. Neither does ResellerRatings.com provide the actual price comparison engine through. ResellerRatings.com provides rating for the resellers, but the actual price comparison is done through shopping.com’s API call.

Combining the Two…

Dealighted could have been two separated sites. However there is a tiny bit of integration between the deals aggregator and the price comparison engine. When you look at a product, the first tab at right next to Store offers will list all the related deals. So there you have it — a product that you might be interested in, a list of shops that sell this item, and a list of recently analysed deal threads that are related to this product item.

Conclusion

While Dealighted is pretty much irrelevant to us Aussies, but I do like the idea of these full-automated sites. However, they can also be easily replicated with a few days of code hacking. To make an automated site stands out, you need to provide more than just “showing threads with more than x replies and y page views”. Integrating with a price comparison engine is a good start, but I think Dealighted still needs a bit of work to make it generally useful.

Yet there are already many coupon sharing sites with similar goals, and what makes 100 Big Coupons different? From its about us page:

100 Big Coupons was launched with a few key concepts in mind. One is there are minimal banners and advertisements that will be found throughout our site. Another key concept in the design of 100 Big Coupons was to make the site as fast loading and easy to use as possible.

Looks like minimalistic design plus good usability are what it tries to differentiate itself. Is it so? How useful is the site? Any relevance to us the Down Under shoppers?

Banners and Advertisements

What impresses me about the site is its minimalistic design. No fancy over bloated image, no banner ads popped up from all corners — just a plain functional site. Loading its home page + all images and Javascript, according to the network analysis tool in FireBug, takes 4.57 sec from Sydney Australia, half the globe away from where 100 Big Coupons is hosted, Toronto in Canada. Not bad.

I can only find one banner ads at the top right hand corner, which means the rest of the site is dedicated to navigation elements and its main content. Thumbs up for that.

Finding Coupons

Let’s look at user accessibility here. After all, you do not come to a coupon listing site for its fast loading speed — you are coming here for the coupons! There are a few ways to locate the coupons. Here is their home page –

As you can see, online stores are listed on the left hand side alphabetically (although just a partial list), and on the right hand side in categories. A search function is implemented so you can find all stores that match a keyword. On the home page it also lists out all the recently added coupons.

There is also an RSS feed for the newest coupons and deals, however

• RSS feed is not advertised in the HTML header (using <link rel="alternate" ... />), so it is difficult for feed readers to automatically pick up the feeds.
• No date information in the feed items. In my opinion, published date information is very important for a coupons/deals site.

I guess I can be more forgiving here as RSS feed link has been marked as “beta”, but it is just something I think can be easily done and improved upon.

I have briefly counted on the full merchant listing page and it has coupons and deals for around 500 merchants. Actually might be less as some do not actually have any existing coupon nor deal associated with them. The number of coupons is actually a bit disappointing. Going to a big merchant like Buy.com reveals only 8 coupons and 11 deals, which you would have expected more.

From the home page you can also subscribe to their news letter for latest updates. A useful feature however, is the ability to subscribe only to a certain merchant. For example if I am only interested in Amazon’s offers, I can go to that page and subscribe to it. Alternatively you can go to their sign up page to subscribe only the merchants you are interested in.

Conclusion

Personally I found 100 Big Coupons a fast, easy-to-navigate site. However it was let down by the number of deals it has listed. Moreover, it is not that relevant to the readers of this blog. Unlike RetailMeNot, there is no category that is for the Australian merchants (although I’ve seen Canadian merchants all over the place). Nor does it provide instant community feedback like RetailMeNot, as you cannot see how each coupon is rated by other fellow shoppers.

At the same time, RetailMeNot was let down by its pool browsing interface (folkosonomy/tagging does not work in everything), whereas 100 Big Coupons is a far easier site to browse around.

9malls.com online shopping mall is dedicated to providing its visitors with coupons, coupon codes, special offers, discounts, and shopping information that will save users money and enhance their on-line shopping experience.

From its “About Us” page, it also details what sets 9malls.com apart from many other online coupon/shopping websites on the Internet today. Basically 9malls.com’s goal is to be “the top coupon and most informative coupon shopping site on the Internet”, and unlike many of its competitors it is willing to list websites and coupons that are not affiliated with them, i.e. they will not get a kickback if you click through a link on their site and then make a purchase.

The goal of 9malls.com sounds great — to be as unbiased as possible to provide great bargains and coupons to its users. In this review I will review whether 9malls.com is what it claims to be.

Site Presentation

Your mom is right — first impression matters! How does 9malls.com perform in this category? Not very good. It feels like an amatuer site put up in the late 90’s. Information is scattered everywhere when you step into its front page. If you are a determined bargain hunting coming here asking yourself, “where can I find the best deals?” it will take you a while to figure out how exactly the site worked.

Another problem I have with it is its use of hostname in URLs — some links say “9malls.com”, and some links say “www.9malls.com”. Looks like it not only try to confuse humna visitors, but also search engine bots.

The only thing I like about its site design is the logo — hmm that’s about it. However, these are minor issues as long as it lists great coupons and deals, right?

Where to Find Coupons & Deals?

There are basically two ways to browse stores on 99malls.com — by category and by store names. You can either click on the category links near the top of the page (Apparel, Books, Clearance, Computers, etc), or go to store listing directly by clicking on the alphabet listing.

Take the Electronics category for example, it lists out all the major online stores that sell electronics and gadgets (Amazon, BestBuy, etc), and links to their coupons and in some cases reviews.

Do note that 9malls.com does not host its own coupons, instead these are just links to coupons hosted elsewhere (DealNews, CouponCabin, FatWallet, etc). Some shop reviews are written and hosted by 9malls.com, but many are just links to other sites who happen to have a review on those online stores.

And there are… Affiliation Links!

Store-by-name listing is a different story — in fact I figured it out that the category-based lists and alphabet-based lists are totally independent. In here you have stores of A to Z, and most (if not all) the links are in fact affiliation links! No discount / coupon are stated on these pages, so basically they are just there to get affiliating clicks.

There are other deals posted on the front-page, but I think the only thing news-worthy are the ones taken directly from SlickDeals forum — where you can get the deals directly from SlickDeals yourself.

Conclusion

Overall I did not find 9malls.com offering anything I need.

If you are a serious bargain hunter, you might already have good sources of great deals, and there is no point adding 9malls.com into your bookmarks. If you do not yet have any website to check for coupons and deals, I shall recommend RetailMeNot for easy-to-search coupon listing. Also check out ProBargainHunter’s links, especially the price comparison sites and bargain hunting sites.

However, is it the best coupon listing site out there? Not by a long way, and they have a huge catch up to do.

(Just in case you are wondering what this post is about, I am writing a sponsored review paid by ReviewMe. For more information about ReviewMe, see my review here.)

Who is WebbyPlanet?

Let’s face it. WebbyPlanet is Yet-Another-Coupon-Listing-Site. This is how it describes itself:

Webbyplanet is an online community that helps shoppers save money and make smart purchases. On the site you will find online coupons, products, sales, reviews, and rebates. The site is updated throughout the day by its staff and forum members. We are dedicated to providing you with the tools needed to find the best deals online.

It is owned by a company in German, and has coupon sites in Australia, UK, France, Italy and German. I guess for my Aussie readers you will be more interested to know about their equivalent in Australia, where you can actually search Australian retailers for coupon codes (although I have yet to find anything interesting).

Coupons and links are listed in reverse-chronological order, and you can also sign up to their newsletter email to receive notification on all the latest coupons.

Online Community, Or Business Model?!

While its emphasis is on “online community”, I have not yet discovered any “community” feature on the website. Forums maybe? Except it is currently showing MySQL error, which is not helpful at all for a public website requesting a paid review.

Otherwise, its “community” is pretty much its list of retailers who are trying to advertise on this website. You can pay them $180/month to have your business listed on WebbyPlanet, or $300/week if you like the front-page spot. Funny that WebbyPlanet lists itself as “a SmarterGate.com company”. However when you visit the said website, it is nothing more than a parked domain with advertisement on gates and fences. Fishy?

After all, is it worth while to advertise on WebbyPlanet? Maybe — it has PageRank 5 and Alexa traffic ranking of around 110,000. Maybe it’s a good deal (I have no idea about the advertising market), but certainly 5,000 companies took the bait as they claimed.

Besides direct advertisement, WebbyPlanet also makes money through Google AdSense on shop pages and search result, as well as CPA affiliations.

But anything for the consumers?

Yup. There are some coupons when you search for them. Searching is relatively easy, although it does not provide an easy to use browsing interface (tagging or better categorising will be good). However I found majority of links actually do not have coupon code associated with them. They called it “linked coupon”, where discount is applied when you click through. When you actually trace through the links, you’ll usually find that (1) discount is available regardless whether you click through (2) they are just affiliation links which they get paid when you make a purchase.

So, what’s for us the consumers? You can certainly use it to search for coupon code, but don’t expect every link gives you a big discount.

Conclusion

Let me first thank WebbyPlanet for purchasing this review, and thank ReviewMe for letting me write freely. Coupon listing sites is a crowded market (at least in the US), and WebbyPlanet is far more the best out there. The concept is good, but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired. My biggest complain would be, there simply is not enough “community feature” to keep me stay on their site longer than I need.

It might have the shops that interest you. But for me, I’ll skip this one.