I spotted this site the other day, and it is yet another bargain/deal website for the Australians — Bargain Sniper. Yet another one?! But the truth is, bargain/deal sites are far from saturated in Australia (when you compare the same niche with sites in US), and there are always new bargains waiting to be reported.

Bargain Sniper appears to be still in beta, according to its about page. It’s first deal was posted in mid-February so it has only been in existence for 2 months, although the domain appears to have been registered for longer. Bargain Sniper appears to be operated by the same guys from Computeck, a computer hardware wholesaler/distributor, and the sites are hosted at Jumba. Unlike other deal voting sites in Australia that are developed using Pligg, Bargain Sniper was developed using Drupal — same platform that OzBargain builds on! Good choice mate!

Bargain Sniper actually has a pretty nice design with round corners, shades, drop shadows and everything (designed by the Russian folks here). That’s miles better than OzBargain which I hacked up in text editors :) Meanwhile the implementation took the standard Drupal route, where submitters can create nodes using various “node-types”, i.e. deals, coupons, freebies, etc. At the same time they are using phpBB to power their forums. While phpBB 3 is far more advanced than Drupal’s build-in forums, it does make this section feel disjointed from the Drupal part of the site.

Well. That is my first impression of this new site — nice looking design, good choice of platform, but it somehow does not feel complete due to its beta-ness. Looking forward to share bargains with these guys.

Updated 12/06/2008: Many people searched “bargain sniper” and landed on this page from around 7pm AEST today, which subsequently killed the real bargain sniper site (which now shows “This Account Has Been Suspended”). No idea why there’s a sudden interest?