I can’t remember when did I first came across Tjoos.com, but I vaguely remembered them as a price comparison engine for contact lenses. But that was all very last year. I revisited Tjoos.com again after it has recently been featured on TechNation.com.au, a TechCrunch-like site focusing on web startups in Australia. Then I realised that the founders, Kim Chen and Bart Jellema, are in fact based in Sydney Australia. Moreover, Tjoos.com has gone through a dramatic change.

So what does the Tjoos.com have?

• A collection of stores.
• For each store, a collection of coupon codes.
• For each coupon code, there are some descriptions, an expiry date, and ability to let users to vote whether it is working or not.
• Invalid/expired coupons get pushed to the bottom of page.
• Anyone can add coupon codes against stores.
• Store/site owners can add themselves to Tjoos, i.e. the merchant portal feature.

Here’s a screenshot listing all the Dell.com coupons.

The site is very nicely designed. You’ll find the Ajax has been implemented pretty much everywhere to provide feedback from webserver without reloading the page. It’s clean and easy to use. The site monetised by affiliation links. When you click on the link “Use Coupon”, it might route you through the affiliation site so that when you actually make a purchase, they can then receive commission. The Dell coupons for example, will go through the links provided by ValueClick.

These guys have huge growth even though they have only been in existence for 1 year. They claim that they have 200,000 unique users from all over the world — quite an achievement!

But then I can hear you scratching your head, “hey I think I’ve seen this before”. Exactly what I was thinking when I saw their coupon listing page — it works just like the coupon listing page of RetailMeNot.com, another Aussie startup but based in Melbourne. RetailMeNot has just announced their 100,000th coupon, and they are the second most popular coupon site in the world according to ProBargainHunter. There are heaps of “RetailMeNot clone requests” on freelance project sites — which tells you how popular and how profitable these guys are.

That would be a very good reason for Tjoos to transform itself from contact lens comparison to coupon repository :)

If you search for retailmenot tjoos on Google, you’ll find a lot of articles mentioning Tjoos got comments saying they are basically scrapping/stealing from RetailMeNot. Well I have no idea but Tjoos certainly feels like a copycat despite being more “technologically advanced”. Almost all the comments were written by Jeff/Bonzo (whoever that is), but I guess RetailMeNot is fighting back?

So I guess that’s it? Sydney vs. Melbourne. Sydney Swans vs. Western Bulldogs. Windows/ASP.NET vs. Linux/PHP. Tjoos vs. RetailMeNot? :)