My wife’s 4.5 years old iBook G3 died two weeks ago. Well, probably not like the flaming iBook, but it will not boot from the hard disk, and booting from the installation CD only results kernel panic with memory-related error messages. Sounds like it is time for a new computer! That iBook was actually the last computer I have bought (all my others are either scrapped junk or laptops provided by work which I have no choice what-so-ever) so you can pretty much see how excited I am! Going to the online store and building the new computer to exactly the way I wanted it!!

Oh wait. I am still limited by the budget. D’oh.

So I went to Dell Australia, picked the new Inspiron 1420, and tried to customise it for the best performance my budget allows me to have. (No, don’t ask me why I forsake Apple to go to Dell and Windows Vista). At the end I spec’ed one with

• 2GB DDR2 RAM
• Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz T7100
• 160GB Hard Disk
• 1440×900 14.1″ WXGA
• …

Certainly a good enough computer for my wife to surf the web, edit some documents and do her own tax return (she has been on the Mac for the last 4 years and have to use my PC to run eTax). All up for less than $1,700 (+ 3% cashback from MoneyBackCo). Then I realised something — hey what about extended warranty? I bought AppleCare when I purchased the iBook and I’ll say $400+ for it is actually worth it simply because the motherboard died a year and half down the track and the extended warranty totally covered it.

Then again I am on my 3^rd Dell laptop from work now, all insured with 3 year business care plans, but all have no trouble at all. Moreover if anything goes wrong with a Dell lappy, it should be relatively trivial to fix comparing to an Apple equivalent because (1) I have better knowledge on PC than Mac (2) Dell parts on eBay are cheap. It does make you wonder whether the extra money you pay for the extended warranty (up to $480 for 3 years on an Inspiron) is a good idea.

Well. Finger crossed, took the middle ground and ordered my wife’s new Inspiron with only 2 years warranty.

Do you buy extended warranty on laptops or other products?

It has been a while — no posting for almost 2 weeks! We went away to the Gold Coast for holidays and visiting family for a week, and then I was slacking away for another… Anyway. Let’s see what great bargains have been posted this week.

2 months ago I blogged about RaboBank’s latest financial product — Online saving account with 6.60% interest rate. I was going to give it a go but somehow procrastination got a hold on me (as usual). So I did nothing with my money that is currently parked elsewhere that only pays 6%. However, sometimes slacking does pay, in a good way!

Big thanks to OZUP who is the first to post this deal that gives you $100 bonus when you sign up RaboPlus with InfoChoice’s coupon code. There are only two catches — (1) it is one day only (and already expired) (2) you need to deposit at least $1,000 to get the bonus. 10% instant return can’t be bad, can it? So I have to make sure that I won’t be slack this time and actually applied two accounts on Wednesday. One for me, one for someone else.

If you have missed the deal, there is also another coupon code FF0507 (source)that gives you $25 on sign up.

Everyone likes freebies. Especially something that used to cost $39.95! Thanks to John who posted 20 Page Photobook deal from Snapfish, where you can get a photobook for free with a coupon code form Better Homes and Gardens magazine — all you need to pay is $4.95 P&H! It should work whether you are a new customer to Snapfish or not, and expires on 27 September.

There are also quite a few deals on magazines.

• Free 8 Weeks WA Business News Delivered (thanks mrgq). Looks like a very nice business oriented magazine for those living in Western Australia.
• Bulletin Magazine 25 Issues for $25 (thanks ozpete). You can also get 7.5% moneyback from MBC as well.
• 3 Issues of PC World + 1GB Lexar USB Drive for $25 (thanks manobik). Very nice deal. I ordered mine although I’ve never read PC World before.

Credit card companies usually waived the first year annual fee to get you in, although personally I found the very idea of “annual fee” for credit card is wrong. They should just reduce the barrier of ownership so more people will have credit cards, more transactions will go throw and more money they will make! Anyway. I found a link where you can get Citibank Gold Card with no annual forever! They are good if you are a low spender on credit cards, otherwise a Citibank BP card would be much better with its 1% cashbacks.

Is this a conspiracy that Jetstar and Virgin Blue have birthday together? Nevermind. As long as cheap birthday deals are offered :)

That’s it for this week. Keep the deals coming (so that I would have something to write about next week :)

PayPal AU has just released their latest merchant offer website. Actually the format is still the same — 9 merchants in random rotation with special offers if you pay in PayPal. Just that the domain name is sort-of new. Moreover, there are new PayPal discount offers!

Let me just pick two which I think are very sweet deals.

15% Off Discount from Deals Direct

Deals Direct has a massive 15% off discount if you purchase with PayPal offer until 30^th of July. That is probably the biggest discount I have ever seen from Deals Direct. This Airis T620 PDA with Wifi + Bluetooth + GPS would be $322.15 + $9.95 delivery when you pay by PayPal. That is very cheap for a Mitac Mio P550 clone.

Free Delivery from OO.com.au

OO.com.au is again offering free delivery when you purchase with PayPal. Last time they had it we bought a small upright freezer delivered free — saved us $26.75. Free delivery is great when you buy heavy items, or small/cheap items when the delivery charge is a big proportion of the overall cost.

OO.com.au’s PayPal offer expires 6^th of August.

Via ProBargainHunter, Trezr, a US-based bargain sharing website that I reviewed in September last year, was sold on eBay for $30,100.01 with only 4,000 visitors and 7,500 page views a month but runs on a $79/month dedicated server.

As I have already commented on Yan’s blog, 4k visitors a month is less than 135 visitors a day average, which is pathetic. If the site is sold through places like SitePoint Marketplace, where many people take 12 month revenue as price guideline, $30k means it can bring in $2,500 a month for the owner. At 4k visitors average per month, I do not think so.

It also answered a question I had when I first reviewed this site 10 months ago. I said, in comparison to dealplumber,

On the other hand, Trezr.com forbids people from posting affiliation links. They need to link directly to the product page. It actually generated quality links, instead of few selected users spamming the entire site.

It turns out that the real reason they do not want users to submit affiliation links is — they can put in their own affiliation code! From the eBay description:

Trezr was one of the first “Web 2.0” social shopping platforms, and the first (and potentially only) platform of its kind to automatically monetize outbound traffic to retailers. The site generates revenue each time a user makes a purchase that originated on Trezr, even though all our content is submitted by users.

Writing an URL transformer to convert a product URL to an affiliation link is actually very easy, so I do not think it is of any real innovation. Definitely not the best $30k you have spent.

If you actually follow the comments in the TechCrunch coverage, you’ll notice that there are simply too many bargain sharing sites around. One might disappear today and you can be sure that three others will arise tomorrow, as the cost of entrance is just way too low. Download Pligg CMS, hire someone from India through Elance, spend the rest on marketing — and you too can have your own Trezr.com for way less than $30k.

Maybe we’ll have more bargain hunting sites than the actual bargains one day…

Recently I have come across another Australian bargain sharing website as it was advertised here via Google AdWords — Fobo.com.au. According to its About page,

Fobo is the leading Social Bargain Sharing website for Australian consumers. Based on the idea of community bargain sharing, our users can not only share and recommend bargains but also vote for them. The most voted bargains automatically come on top in the process. The website is built on the latest Web 2.0 platform.

Gee. Latest Web 2.0 platform — that is quite a mouthful of jargon. When you look right into its HTML source, the very “Web 2.0 platform” that powers Fobo.com.au is none other than the open-sourced Pligg CMS. Moreover, Fobo’s theme certainly looks very similar to Dealigg, another popular Pligg-powered bargain sharing site in US — just check the screenshots!

I guess I better make a disclaimer here — this review on Fobo.com.au will be completely biased as this yet-another social bargain site is a direct competitor to the community site of this blog, OzBargain.com.au. So sorry about dissecting and criticising this website! There are other reasons which I will reveal later.

Continue reading »

Ross Gittins is Sydney Morning Herald’s economy editor and is one of my favourite — he has the ability to decipher economy to a point that even a software guy like me could understand. He has written an interest article a few days ago on the Herald, titled The Uninformed Pay the Price. An very interesting article worth a read, and at the end he concluded:

When you use price as a guide to quality you are assuming other buyers are much better informed than you are and that sellers aren’t taking advantage of everybody’s ignorance.

Buyers would get better value for money if, rather than assuming prices are always set fairly, they put a bit more effort into being better informed.

However at the beginning of the article, he stated:

… buyers are often not nearly as well informed. That’s often because they don’t buy such items often enough — or the items don’t account for a big enough part of their budgets — to make it worth the time and effort it would take to be well-informed.

It is great to be informed and not pay the stupid price for crappy items from dodgy merchants. However it is assuming that the monetary equivalent of time and effort is less than the amount you can save for being informed. In reality it is not often the case — we only have 24 hours a day and they are valuable! Sometimes I wonder whether the two hours I spent making sure I am really getting the cheapest price is worth it, when I am only saving something like ten bucks.

How much time should I spend to get informed to justify my time and effort economically? That is the million dollar question.

That is why we have websites like OzBargain who members share the best deals around so you do not have to spend that much time finding them. That is why we have price comparison engines like staticeICE and ShopBot to save you time visiting each individual merchants. That is why we have Product Review and Epinions to keep you informed from other consumers’ experience.

Know your online tools, which make keeping-informed much easier. Get informed, and get better value for your hard-earned money.

Thanks to yintzee for posting this great deal at SonyCentral in Melbourne, where team members and their families and friends can get big discount on Sony items today or tomorrow (20-21 July).

On Friday 20th and Saturday 21st of July 2007 in the Melbourne stores team members, their families and friends will have access to a range of exclusive offers. To access this offer you will need to present this Sony Central email discount offer in store on either of the 2 days. Simple and easy! The discounts offered are not available to the general public and will not be offered outside these 2 days.

The discount offers are detailed below, together with any conditions that apply. Where an existing catalogue or promotional offer overlaps with the special offer, you will be entitled to the better of the two offers.

So what sort of discount are we looking at?

Pretty nice offer with 20% off Bravia LCD TV’s, 15% off camera and vide cams, 5% off Vaio notebook computers. Then it looks a bit oxymoron here:

Please ensure that the flyer is forwarded to as many of your family and friends as possible to ensure they are able to take advantage of the exclusive bargains.

Not sure whether you can put “as many as possible” and “exclusive” on the same sentence. Let us just give them the benefit of doubt and not assume any viral marketing scheme is practised — it gives great bargains after all.

The last thing is — this offer is available for those in Melbourne only. Well, two more hours to COB today but you can still take this offer tomorrow.

Daily Deals‘s Catch A Thon number 7 is on Today! It has been a month since their last one, and it was promised to be the biggest ever (which sort of makes sense as they accumulate more and more deals so each time it just gets bigger).

And the website speed pretty much proves how big this Catch A Thon is. It is only 15 minutes pass twelve, and Daily Deals’ website is already crawling. While I was going to write something about some personal picks but I guess I simply can’t this time as one whole page took more than 3 minutes to load.

Fortunately we have got QQQ from Catch of the Day doing a “CotD TV” showing some of the highlights at this month’s Catch A Thon.

Btw, it is nice to match names with faces — I have been “talking” to a lot of merchants and web site owners since running this blog but it is nice to actually see some name you know actually talking on a video. However, a video-cast from oz bargain blog? Hmmm. Maybe not :)

As predicted last week, we are seeing more airfare deals this week! Moreover, it is again Jetstar ranked at the top — quality of in-flight service aside, they surely know how to make buzz! Thanks to vincent who posted this, Jetstar is selling 10,000 seats for $1 last Monday.

However the question is, how many people actually got their tickets? That was John’s question in the discussion thread, but we have not got any response yet. Jetstar might be a star in its buzz-making marketing department, but they definitely need to put in a bit more budget into its server-stalling IT department — its website basically became inaccessible during the sale hours, like what happened in every previous Jetstar sales.

There are other airfare deals posted during the week. Tiger Airway’s entrance into Australia domestic market with $49.95 Melbourne to Perth ticket, Air New Zealand’s cheap tickets with $239 to NZ from Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne. Thanks to John and noneother. Now I wish I have more holidays.

Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, that one of the most voted deal last week is Coles’ special on Arnott’s Tim Tam — $1.35. Yum. Certainly a sweet deal. There are actually quite a lot of bargains on Coles’ and Woolies’ catalogues. For example in this weekly catalogue (on sale 16-22 July), Arnott’s Shapes are now 99 cents (save $1.26). Maybe biased towards savoury than sweet, but still — more cheap junk food for all you nerds out there.

Let’s see what’s next. WAIT, there is MORE — more junky food that is. Krispy Kreme celebrates their 70th birthday by offering their delicious doughnuts at 70 cents each! It is quite cheap as assorted dozen costs $16.95 online, however the offer expires this Friday, 20 July 2007. Thanks to ozeben for posting that.

Thanks to JeffreyM who posted this coupon from Borders where you can get 20% off 1 full priced kids book, valid until 26 July. Also congratulation to JeffreyM who has made 100 posts at OzBargain. Thanks mate for keeping all these deals coming!

We also got two deals from ShoppingSquare this week, both posted by John (do you also happen to work for ShoppingSquare? :) First of all, a 320GB External Drive for $109.92. That is very cheap, as you can’t even buy a 320GB internal drive at that price in most shops. Again, it is a Samsung. Personally I have no experience with Samsung drives, but one of my friends at church worked at warranty claim for Samsung hard disks and optical drives. He seems to be pretty confident :)

Here’s another deal from ShoppingSquare — Athlon 64×2 4000 gaming system for less than $900. You get 1GB DDR2, 320GB HDD, 8500GT 256MB video card, 19″ widescreen LCD and wireless keboard + mouse — pretty good deal for that price. However operating system is not included, although you can buy OEM version of Windows Vista from ShoppingSquare. I wonder how well does it run alternate OS like Linux.

Btw, we would like to thank ShoppingSquare for being a sponsor of OzBargain this month.

See you all next week.

Adam sent me his website 2 weeks ago and asked me to take a look. Sorry I only had a chance to write about it this week. Worse, it has been sitting in the draft tray for almost the entire week because I wass sick… Anyway.

Click and Save.com.au is yet-another local business directory that provides coupons that can either be printed out or SMS to your phone. It is in some sense similar to Save as You Spend, which I looked at 4 months ago. Merchants sign up with the website and offer printable coupons online. Visitors can then browse or search for these coupons. Visitors can either search by location (city/state) or by categories. Once you have found the merchant, you can either print the coupon out, send coupon via SMS, or “add to basket” (which is a weird concept for coupons).

Continue reading »

Thanks to Dan for posting this great deal on OzBargain.com.au — 10% off Team Member Discount from Officeworks! The discount is on almost everything (except iTunes cards, recharge cards, furniture delivery and assemble fees), including promotional and clearance items. All you need to do is:

1. For in-store purchases, print out the coupon and present it at checkout.
2. For online purchases, use the following coupon code: QR7-PRDISC

It is valid from Friday 13 July to Sunday 15 July. Don’t miss out!

Some of the best deals that have been posted on OzBargain this week:

It seems Jetstar is making news every week now! Thanks to Pyro who posted this Jetstar deal, where you can fly to Osaka Japan for $299 between 15 July and 14 August. A sensational sale fare indeed. Japan is also a good transit point if you want to visit other north part of Asia (South Korea, North-East China for example). I am sure we’ll see more Jetstar deals in the coming weeks.

(Just a personal gripe — don’t fly Jetstar to Melbourne unless you prefer the smaller Avalon airport instead of Tullamarine.)

Also thanks to John for posting this deal from ShoppingSquare — Western Digital Elements 500GB external for $194.95. Large hard drives are useless to me personally as I am still “struggling” to fill up my 2x 80GB RAID1 drive at home (no, no need to send me “tips” on how to accomplish that). However I am pretty sure that for some of you guys, you can zap through a 500GB drive in no time. I don’t think 500GB is the “sweet spot” yet (it’s around 300-400GB at the moment I think), but at the rate people archiving their photos, videos and TV recordings, the price better comes down soon.

Toy sale seems to be the highlights of last week. We have both Big W and Kmart bringing out massive toy sales last week. I can see that Target’s preliminary toy sale catalogue is already online (for 19-29 July). I went to Toys “R” Us yesterday and it has a pretty good range of on-sale items as well. Anyone knows why everyone is selling toys in July?

On the topic of toys, Yogee is having an 15% off all toys exclusive deals for the OzBargain members! Thanks Yogee for offering this! I was just browsing their toys category and it has a pretty good range for younger children, i.e. not my kind of toys as they’ll be under “Computers” category :) I know they are in Sydney but not sure whether they offer pick up as deliverying those bulky toys can be expensive.

Want some cheap movie tickets? Daily Deals have got them! $39.95 gets you 5 adult tickets and $77 gets you 10 adult tickets, plus $2.95 for delivery. These tickets can be used on Monday to Thursday. At $8/ticket delivered it is really a bargain. Again a little bit useless to me as (1) with 2 small children we rarely have chance to go to cinema to watch movies (2) Tuesday at Ritz is only 7 bucks :)

More at OzBargain.

Over the last couple of days many visitors have landed on this blog when they searched Kmart Toy Sale on Google, where last year’s sale page was ranked on the first page. I checked Kmart’s website earlier this morning and it was still showing last week’s catalogue. I have just checked again and it is now showing the Kmart Toy Sale!

Sale starts on 5 July and ends on 11 July.

There are 56 pages and I think it would take me a while to digest, which I got plenty of time as the sale won’t start until Thursday. I usually just check the game console price as I do track them, and there are some nice bundles for Xbox 360, Wii and PlayStation 3 (not that I am allowed to buy any).

Update: Thanks to JeffreyM who posted Big W Toy Sale at OzBargain, Big W’s Toy Sale catalogue is out as well!

Yes the whole 120+ pages of it. Thanks!

It has been a quiet week for me — I went to Melbourne for a couple of days to attend a wedding, and believe it or not, it was my first time going to Melbourne for non-work related reason. So instead of travelling between airport and office, I actually got to check out a little bit of Melbourne. I am afraid to say, especially as a Sydneysider myself, that Melbourne still offers the best shopping experience in Australia. Now I can understand why someone would fly down there on Friday night, do some shopping on Saturday, and fly back to Sydney before heading back to work on Monday. Personally I wouldn’t do that as I much prefer shopping online.

So let us check out some of the best deals at OzBargain, shall we?

Everyone loves freebies — you cannot even calculate the percentage of discount. Thanks to Michael for posting this Free Avery Label on OzBargain. You can request free Avery products by filling in the forms, and telling them what you want. You can get all kinds of sample labels for free by just completing the details.

Another free deal comes from JeffreyM, who posted this free Hoyts movie tickets at OzBargain. With supplied coupon code, you can test out Quickflix DVD rental for free, as well as two Hoyts tickets for you to watch whatever is in cinema. 2x Hoyts tickets would be at least $20 — great saving if you have not tried Quickflix in your household before.

How often do you travel to Macau or Hong Kong. Having a Hongkie wife means that I have to go there once every year to visit the in-laws, and I usually fly Cathy Pacific. Now fueltank has pointed out that Viva Macau is having a promotion at the moment, that you can fly to Macau from Sydney for $588, tax included. Ferry from Macau to Hong Kong would cost around HKD$140-$270 (AUD$21-41 depending on class and day of the week). That means you can get to the Pearl of the East for slightly over $600 — and that is very cheap! Maybe some Hongkies can verify how good this deal is…

On the topic of cheap flights, do you know that Jetstar is now also flying international? Moreover, you can get $100 off when you book with your MasterCard! Except this offer has already expired. However, as Tiger Airways has also started offering flights, we’ll only going to see more cheap flights offered.

There are more for this week — make sure you check them out at OzBargain.

Another exclusive deal this week — Deals Direct is offering users of OzBargain 10 percent off everything in store with the following coupon code:

OZBARGAIN

This coupon code is valid for one week only, expiring on Friday, 6^th of July. Wow. Indeed. Wow. Thanks Deals Direct for bring in us great deals!

That means you can buy this Palm Treo 680 PDA/SmartPhone which I wrote about a few days ago for less than $500 + delivery. Definitely one of the best smart phone deal around.