At church last Sunday and in one of the sermon illustrations, our pastor joking said that one of the reason to have children is that you can now find the excuse to buy the toys you always wanted. Yes for those of us with kids we all know how TRUE this statement is! Too bad that I kept on asking my daughter whether she is interested in a Nintendo Wii, but at her age (turning 4 in a few days) she is more interested in a bicycle than a Wii…

Nevertheless, the annual Toy Sale at Kmart, Big W and Target can still get me very excited. Every year they promised to be bigger and better, and we can definitely see that in the new websites they have bought out!

Kmart Super Toy Sale

Kmart now has a direct link to their new toy sale site — Where Good Times Start that currently has nothing but two flash games. The bold notice at the top reminding us how many days left before the super toy sale starts on 3^rd of July, and the sale will run for 2 weeks.

Never mind the music. The catalogue is not even available online yet, but you do get an opportunity to surrender your email address for the latest updates. But wow — a dedicated website for the toy sale. This gotta to be big.

Big W Toy Sale

Big W also has a flash animation on their home page (with a fancy count down timer) that links to their Toy Sale page. Not as fancy as Kmart’s (where’s my flash game to win prizes?!) but at least they already have their Toy Sale catalogue on their Lasoo powered site — all 132 pages of it! I actually loves Lasoo powered catalogue sites, because

1. Lasoo allows you to rebrand and sits on your own sub-domain, which makes categorisation easier at OzBargain (we group deals by linked URL)
2. Search works. If someone said, “hey that Wii in the latest Big W Toy Sale is cheap”, you won’t need to flip through all 132 pages to find it.
3. Individual product pages with images + selectable text. Very important for submitting to OzBargain.

“Our Biggest Toy Sale Catalogue Ever!” — from 3 July to 16 July.

Target Toy Sale

Target toy sale always happens after both Big W and Target. Great timing as well — as it’s very close to my wife’s birthday. Let me see what sort of toy should I get for myself, hmm my wife I mean.

Starts on 24 July but the catalogue won’t be available until the end of this month, and again email address is needed to get a sneak preview.

I am sure a lot of highlights will be picked up by the OzBargain members and will be posted on our community site over the next week or two. Where do you plan to do your toy shopping?