Here is SmartCompany’s list of Australia’s best independent online-only retailers in alphabetical order. Our list includes market leaders, established players and some rising stars. But all are setting the pace in a dynamic sector.

Some are well-known names on OzBargain — CatchOfTheDay, DealsDirect, Kogan, etc. Some have never been listed — OKme.com.au?

Groceryrun.com.au, an offshoot of CatchoftheDay.com.au, offers up to 200 discounted products from well-known brands and charges a flat shipping fee for deliveries anywhere in Australia. But it comes with a few catches. There will be no perishable items. The products won’t always be the same and might not be available from one week to the next, and nor will customers be able to shop whenever the need arises. The deals will only be able available on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

It’s from the same team, the Leibovich brothers, that brought us Catch of the Day and Scoopon. Currently the website looks like a mess — like those Catch-a-thon events where all the products just get dumped to the front page of the website with no obvious order — way less organised than Deals Direct’s competing site. But then again online discounted grocery is still in its infancy, and we’ll see how everything folds in the near future.

At flat rate of $11 delivery to anywhere in Australia — I’ll need to buy *a lot* of Mars Bar to get the saving back.

Because Swoopo is, at its heart, thinly veiled gambling. The companies backing Swoopo and other Penny Auction sites are hoping unsophisticated regulatory agencies will buy the “It’s not a game of chance” argument if it’s wrapped in a lot of technical intarweb mumbo-jumbo they can’t fully comprehend.

Reminds me of many unique bid auction sites that surfaced online 2 years ago, where some of them have actually been covered here on the OzBargain blog. I actually went to the Swoopo site and it does feel like gambling — and it’s addictive. I can just sit there and watch the clock counts down to 0, or bounds back to 15 second again with more bidding action.

It’s actually worse than gambling because not only you need to pay for entrance, win the auction purely by chance (and risk loosing your money not winning the auction), addictive in nature which you ended up spending more than you should because you don’t want to lose out — you still need to pay for than damn thing when you win.

But somehow it has gained a lot of popularity according to Alexa. I guess the old saying is right. Every second on Swoopo, “a fool and his money is soon parted”.

BShare.com.au

First we have BShare.com.au. I presume B in BShare stands for Bargain, and it looks like it is still in pre-launch stage:

Well. There’s very little I can find out about this website. Its 1st deal was posted just after the new year so I guess that would be the age of this website. It’s also Drupal-based + the Drigg module. Page thumbnail generated with PageGlimpse.

EnterTheBargain.com.au

This is much more better looking (I wish I have the design skillz, ha!) and it’s using the Kung-Fu theme and the pun on this Bruce Lee’s movie.

It’s vBulletin powered so it’s much more forum like. From the posts it looks like it has been around since September last year.

Well. Looks like it’s becoming an even more saturated market. All the best to BShare and EnterTheBargain.

What a good idea!

Here is a tip for ya, Shaztronics. Grab the actual scores from OzBargain (I can provide the API for you), Buckscoop and other voting sites, and then build a ‘meme-like aggregator that highlights deals that got linked the most (+ most votes) automatically (like Techmeme) — but for Australian deals :)

There are two main things that are new on u.Lasoo but not available on OzBargain and other sites –

1. Integration with the main Lasoo site, where visitors can post items directly from inside the catalogue. Even a visitor can do that.

2. Members can earn money from their Google AdSense account. If you have a publisher ID, you can paste in and Google Ads with your publisher ID will be shown on the deals that you have posted.

I think (2) and the very idea of “making money online” can be quite attractive. From their FAQ page it is a bit ambiguous — of course as a publisher you are getting 100% of Google AdSense revenue that goes into your account. However I guess they meant to say that your ads will get 100% exposure, i.e. they will not rotate with their own ads, like many other profit-sharing sites (like RetailMeNot who does 50%). But don’t quote me that on.

Good idea? Maybe. Maybe not.

Like Angus has said in his LifeHacker post, you might not earn a lot of money from it. But I guess a lot is rather subjective. It might mean $10/month to some (like most sites running AdSense). Meanwhile someone might want to be the next Markus Frind earning 5 figures per day. But hey, anything is better than nothing!

However, the “revenue generation device”, i.e. Google AdSense, is not available to everyone. In order to have an AdSense account, you must have an established website that Google is happy for you to monetise. So at the end the site might be dominated by website owners as they have higher incentive to post.

But it is not my biggest problem with running an AdSense profit-sharing site. My biggest problem is — click frauds. Once you let people providing their own publisher code, there bound to be someone who wants to speed up the money-earning process by clicking on his own ads. Well, that’s Google’s problem, and they are usually pretty good at catching this kind of fraudulent activities — and they will ban the account for life. Now, Google also detects repeat offenders by association (so they can’t get back into the system), and sharing the same site as other banned accounts might just be enough to trigger the alarm — it’s not the kind of risk that I would like to take.

Well. Some people might think I am spreading FUD here because Lasoo has suddenly turned from a sponsor (they bought quite a bit of placement ads on OzBargain via AdSense) to a competitor. I guess it’s true — I am freaking out! Well, not really but I know Lasoo’s marketing budget is infinitely bigger than OzBargain (well, anything divided by 0 is infinity). They have got a great looking site. And they have more friends on Facebook than OzBargain (c’mon, show your support here!) OzBargain still has advantage in features and community, but both can be fixed with $$$.

We’ll see. The bargain sharing space in Australia might be very different 12 months from now.

Update — Ray asked “Are they running a script or in-house developed?”

I had a look at their site structure and I think u.Lasoo is running a modified version of Kigg, is a “Digg like application developed with ASP.NET MVC Framework, LINQ to SQL and ASP.NET AJAX”. Obviously they have done up the template, added the integration with their catalogue system, etc. Always a good idea to check existing scripts if you want the speed to market.

I also suspect that this Newcastle company developed u.Lasoo.

Under the category Best site for freebies and vouchers listed a site that I had a quick review back in April — Bargain Sniper. Now, why is this site the best for freebies and vouchers is beyond me. Or maybe those in ACA/NineMSN can enlighten me about who can get to be featured — because I don’t mind the traffic it brings!

At around 7pm AEST my server, which usually pushes out traffic at around 300kbps at that time of the day, gets a traffic spike at as much as 2Mbps! It turns out that Bargain Sniper’s hosting company, Jumba, suspended their hosting account (due to traffic spike I presume). As my review page came out as #2 on Google’s search result page on “bargain snipper”, everyone came to this blog instead! Over the 2 hour span I am getting around 4,000-5,000 page views at this blog, which is around 20 times what it would normally get.

So here is my congratulation to the Bargain Sniper guys for making onto the national television. It would be interesting to see what do they have in store when the door re-opens tomorrow.