Remember uLasoo, the deal sharing Salmat-backed deal sharing website of Australia’s biggest online catalogue that I have blogged about almost 4 years ago? Just got an email from “The Lasoo Team”:

Thanks for your support of our social experiment that was uLasoo. A place where we began a community where members truly owned part of the furniture. Some good things must come to an end, and uLasoo will be shutting down on 26 July…

The same message can also be found on their site. It’s unsurprising actually. If you take a look at their home page, the deal posting is all over the place. In fact, deals posted 3 years ago are still on the front page. Their plan to grow the site via profit sharing did not really work out either, and as I’ve mentioned in my blog, profile sharing social website would have been a dangerous territory that probably would not attract serious publishers.

Still, it’s a nice looking website despite haven’t really been updated for 4 years. Lasoo team are moving on with new projects though, as seen in their email message:

However, this isn’t the end of the social journey at Lasoo, in fact, it is just the beginning of a new social and mobile era. In the coming months a new socially aware shopping tool will be released for iPhone – lasoo.it.

It seems to be a product comparison app where you can scan the bar code, find items in Lasoo’s catalogues and find stores that sell that product. It also allows you to browse their catalogues on your beloved iDevices. Not really sure about “beginning of a new era”, as it has actually been released for iOS since August 2009, with Android and Win Phone version “coming soon”. Maybe an updated app with FB/Twitter integration? We’ll see.

Hoo-ah-way? Hoo we? For those who wish to skip the video, it’s apparently pronounced “Wah-Way”.

Huawei phones are quite popular on OzBargain with 43 deals posted with most of those postings occurring in 2011. The majority of Huawei phones are priced below $100 dollars.

Top 5 Popular Huawei phones:

	X3	Deals: 6 Avg Vote: 23	Cheapest price $62
	IDEOS U8150	Deals: 6 Avg Vote: 37	Cheapest price $59
	U8300	Deals: 5 Avg Vote: 24.8	Cheapest price $29
	IDEOS X1	Deals: 5 Avg Vote: 7.2	Cheapest price $29
	U8800 IDEOS X5	Deals: 3 Avg Vote: 23	Cheapest price $279

There have been many deals posted that didn’t start until a date in the future. The most notable one was the IKEA eat your discount deal posted on September 5 but not starting until December 12.

How can users remember a deal that far in the future?

• Hit the Add Reminder link and get a reminder sent in your newsletter and displayed on the frontpage.

 or

• Browse the Deals Starting Soon page to see deals that will be starting soon.

If you want to remind others of a popular deal that was posted in the past but starts soon, send a message to a moderator and we may be able to sticky the deal to the frontpage.

The first voucher (group buy) site appeared on OzBargain around the beginning of January 2010 in the form of Ouffer. One by one, the market became saturated by these voucher sites. So has the bubble burst and  are these sites days numbered?

Just by looking at the amount of voucher sites, one could make the argument that we’ve hit peak and are slowly consolidating to a few big players. Take a look at the wiki page listing group buy sites. Looking at the history of the page, at one point there were 23 sites serving both Melbourne and Sydney. It currently list 16 active site for Sydney and 17 for Melbourne.  That’s a drop of 28% from it’s peak.

Let’s take a look at the amount of posts over time by these sites.

 Amount of posts (Rep posts not included. User posts only.)

Ouffer – First voucher site in Australia. Big start but has now fizzles to no recent deals in June 2012.

Monthly Average: 2.67

Most popular month: Sept 2010

Scoopon – Strong start in April 2010 and consistently high monthly posting average until April 2011. April 2011-April 2012 lull in posts but then a pickup from April 2012 to June 2012.

Monthly Average: 7.48

Most popular month: Feb 2011

Groupon – Strong start but upward trend ending with June 2012 as biggest month.

Monthly Average: 4.41

Most popular month: June 2012

Livingsocial – Strong start but very small monthly posting average.

Monthly Average: 2.68

Most popular month: August 2011

Cudo – Strong start but very small monthly posting average.

Monthly Average: 2.91

Most popular month: September 2010

Quantity of posts is only one metric to measure popularity of these deals. Let’s take a look at the quality of the posts (e.g vote counts).

Average votes per month (Rep posts not included. User posts only.)

Ouffer – A few blips.

Monthly Average: 6.84

Most popular month: May 2012   Most popular deal: Free Pieface Pie (+137)

Scoopon -Starts big, levels out until April 2011. April-July 2011 bad. July 2011-March 2012 average. March 2012 – June 2012 shows very high numbers.

Monthly Average: 11.45

Most popular month: April 2010   Most popular deal: $2  Hungry Jacks Whopper & Fries (+566)

Groupon – Steady numbers. Pulling big numbers between February to June 2012.

Monthly Average: 11.93

Most popular month: June 2012   Most popular deal: $6 for a $10 Woolworths Caltex Petrol Card (+189)

Livingsocial – Steady average but recent spikes in May 2012.

Monthly Average: 7.89

Most popular month: May 2012   Most popular deal: $2 Pizza Hut Pizza (+75)

Cudo – Some spikes but nothing significant.

Monthly Average: 8.04

Most popular month: May 2011   Most popular deal: 50% off Krispy Kremes (+65)

Conclusions

• The amount of voucher sites are slowly dwindling in numbers.
•  Scoopon, Groupon and Livingsocial deals are getting increasingly popular with their highest average monthly numbers coming in 2012.
• Cheap junk food tops the most popular deals by these group buy companies.

_{1.  This isn’t a definite list and it’s possible that some companies are not listed on the wiki page.}

_{2. This isn’t a scientific analysis.}

_{3. Jumponit and Livingsocial were at times offering the same deals. At other times, they had different deals. The figures are murky at best.}

_{4.  As time progresses, increased membership at OzBargain means higher average vote counts for all deals.}

It is one of many small handy features that got implemented on OzBargain unannounced, except this request got marked as “Resolved”. Do you know that you can customise your OzBargain Front Page and New Deals Page by hiding stores and users that you are not particularly fond of? Rather than complaining, “hey I am an Android user but why do you show me all these free iOS games?” you can just

1. Go to iTunes Store listing page

2. Just select one of the deals that you hated most

3. From a list of cryptic looking options under the main deal description, locate “Hide from Listing” and click on it

4. Click on the checkbox “Hide deals from store iTunes Store“

Be gone! No more iTunes Store deals on the deal listing pages!

We actually have this feature running for 7 months already and so far only 128 users have been using it, blocking out a total of 374 stores and users from their deal listing pages. Here are the top 5 stores that are blocked on OzBargain:

5. Greenman Gaming — I have no idea. They seem to be relatively popular on OzBargain as a UK based retail for PC downloadable games. I guess the console people are sick of them getting onto front page?

4. Steam — again, I guess the console gamers are blocking them for all the great and cheap games they are missing out :)

3. Koorong — I can see why Christian bookshops are getting unpopular, consider from the latest Census Australians are getting more liberal and unreligious (not to mention scotty is the #1 poster of Koorong deals :)

2. Catch of the Day — Not surprising here, as Catch of the Day deals have always been controversial on OzBargain, since the early “Crash of the Day” era. They have picked up their game a lot these days and remain one of the top online retailer in Australia. But I guess haters gonna hate…

1. iTunes Store — This is the very reason why this feature was implemented. There are actually more than twice number of users blocking iTunes Store than Catch of the Day — way too many Android fanboys out there sobbing for the fact that there just aren’t enough Google Play deals (I myself included).

So next time — if you spot a store that you do not want to see despite everyone else voted them up, use the “Hide from Listing” feature.

Yes, it is here. Samsung Galaxy S III, one of the most highly anticipated phone launch so far this year, has arrived in Australia this morning. As usual, keen OzBargains have already been discussing SGS3’s release since early this month, and the best way to track best deals on Samsung Galaxy S III is keeping an eye on it’s product page on OzBargain. So far 6 deals have been posted, 3 from this morning.

Winners

• Samsung Galaxy S III 16GB for $726.95 delivered from TopBuy, grey-imported somewhere from Asia. Cheapest in Australia from an Australian merchant (so far), and I doubt the price even includes GST.
• Samsung Galaxy S III 16GB for £443.39 delivered from Handtec, which makes it ~AUD$707. That’s the cheapest posted on OzBargain so far.
• Samsung Galaxy S III 16GB for $64/month for 12 months on Vodafone’s CAP29 plan. That comes down to $768 from Vodafone retail, or $728 from Vodafone website (when you also apply for $100 cashback from Buckscoop). Not the cheapest, but you do get a year worth of calls + data.

Losers

• $798 from Allphones. Not too bad I guess, but then many have been burnt from their $200 voucher promotion last year, and the sour taste does linger on.
• $82/month on Telstra 24 Months contract. That’s probably closer to winning the “most expensive” award. You do get NextG network, but not Telstra’s 4G LTE.

Looking at how much Android phones have been losing their values since release — Samsung Galaxy Nexus $828 last December and $408 this week from the same vendor — I won’t be surprised that SGS3 also drop to around $500 mark in 3-4 months, and it’s still likely to remain Samsung’s Hero Phone then. So, spend $700+ and enjoy it now, or $500+ and enjoy it a few months down the track? You decide :)

On a recent thread, a user wrote about how they were frustrated that they were not able to get a Telstra $30 sim card for $10 . He pondered whether he can just buy it now, await another sale, refund the original, and buy again for the sale price. Sure, I guess you can but there is no guarantee that it is going to go on sale again.  Why not just get a rain check? Much to my surprise, some weren’t aware of this very handy bargain tool.  I must admit up until a couple of years ago, I had no idea what it was either.

There are often times when the two major supermarket chains, Woolworths & Coles advertise specials so popular that the items end up selling out. Any supermarket specials heavily voted on by OzBargain are likely to be out of stock. So what can you do?

1. Go to the service desk and ask for a rain check on the out of stock item.
2. They should check to see if there is any stock in-store but this rarely happens in my experience.
3. The service desk will check the price of the current item in the catalogue or by scanning the item.
4. They will write you out a rain check, slightly bigger in size than a business card.  On this paper, it will usually state the date, advertised price, product name, and the maximum quantity you can claim.

You have 30 days to redeem the rain check and are free to do so in any branch of the store. To redeem, just buy your product as usual but when checking out give the rain check to the cashier.

A selection of popular stores that do rain checks:

• Coles
• Woolworths
• Kmart
• Dick Smith
• Target
• 1st Choice Liquor
• Harvey Norman

Note: Some stores have exclusions to what items you can obtain with a  rain check.  In the thread mentioned above, they refused to give him a rain check as they said sim cards were exempt from rain checks.  It’s always worth asking regardless of policy.

P.S.

What’s the origin of the word “raincheck”?

The original raincheck was American. It was a special ticket issued to spectators when a baseball game was cancelled on account of bad weather. This raincheck allowed people to come to another game at a later date. These rainchecks have been around since at least 1884 (see the Oxford English Dictionary). So a raincheck has nothing to do with the check that means “to examine or establish something”. (We would more usually spell this one cheque). The meaning has changed considerably — first, it broadened to include a ticket issued at any outdoor event and the later it meant simply that you could take up an offer at a time more convenient. For example, if someone invited you to dinner, but you were busy you might ask to take a raincheck.

Source: ABC TV

Image credit: Simple Living Sherrie

If OzBargain has been quiet over the last 2 days — I am not surprised. I wasn’t really into video games since the original Team Fortress days fragging your university buddies on 33.6kbps modem, but just by observing the top gaming related deals on OzBargain I can tell that Diablo III is the hottest thing at the moment, and many probably haven’t slept since the game was released yesterday.

The new tagging feature on OzBargain allows moderators to flag some tags as “products”. For those who are still thinking of buying the game, here is the Diablo III page on OzBargain where you can find out what deals have been posted with this product. Notably,

• Diablo III for $58 at BigW, although it would be difficult to find a BigW that still got a copy. Do use that to price match at JB Hi-Fi or DickSmith.
• Blizzard Honoring GAME Payments for Diablo 3, for those who pre-ordered from GAME.com.au that went into administration on Monday.

Have fun!

Earlier on Monday I pushed out a new feature that I’ve been working over last week — Add to Folders. For 2 days only 12 folders have been created on the system, 4 of them are actually testing/demo folders created by the moderators (despite attempts to promote it on Facebook and on Google+). So let’s see when a blog post + hopefully some colour pictures here would help.

The usefulness of Bookmarks has been historically undervalued. It helps to expand the ever so limited human memory and has rescued many who suffered from occasional forgetfulness. It guards the treasures for its owner to go back to. It comes in various forms and shapes — I usually just use my business card because no one seems to be interested in them. On the web browsers it usually fashions in the shape of glowing star. And now OzBargain also comes with its own bookmarks for you to keep track the bargains, although we gave it a pretty pragmatic name — Add to Folders.

The problem we are trying to solve here is simple. OzBargain has lots of bargains posted every single day, and often people want to keep track the deals they are interested in — not necessarily something they want to give +1 to, but just want to organise them into folders so they can do research on them later. Well, you can always use your browser’s bookmarks/favourites — but let me show you how an integrated solution from inside OzBargain can do much more.

Continue reading »

Got up this morning seeing that OzBargain was DOWN, returning 502 Gateway Error message — usually when the backend PHP FastCGI processes were borked. According to the bandwidth graph the site dropped dead at around 1AM this morning:

Went in to restart the PHP processes (where kill -9 was required). That brought the site up for 15 minutes before it died again.

Anyway. According to our webhosting provider Crucial Paradigm (where OzBargain runs on a single 4GB instance of Linux Cloud server), that they were having some issues with maintenance last night. It’s still on their hands now and at the moment we (OzBargain) can’t do anything about it.

Will update this space when there’s a solution.

Update 9:40AM AEST: Server just gets rebooted. There might still have some issues but the site is running for now.

Update 10:15AM AEST: I think everything should be operational now. We are manually sending out the daily newsletter that missed its 7AM run.

Received a “fan” mail today.

Hello

I purchased earings for my wife for Christmas following a “bargain” on your website for Cudo.com.au

The fact is after 1 month, the item is still not received. Apparently I am not the only customer to whom that happened, a few other people are in the same situation.

So I strongly suggest that you take care with the ads on your website as your responsibility could be involved too.

Emphasis mine. Probably referred to this offer here and this forum discussion. With most inquiries I usually just reply saying that OzBargain is just an online community for shoppers to discuss bargains, and they should really contact the merchants directly (in this case, Cudo.com.au).

However, as deal postings can sometimes be seen as “ads on your website” (although that was just one community member sharing a deal he/she found interesting), thus the visitor concluded that “OzBargain is in some way responsible”. IANAL but can that really be the case? “Common sense” says no, especially over a deal that wasn’t well received in the first place. However we live in a land that often defies common sense…

Almost 4 years ago I blogged about OzBargain’s RSS statistics. The conclusion? Email is king. 4 years later email still rules, despite the wealth of options people get notified these days (Facebook, Twitter, iPhone apps, etc). OzBargain daily newsletter has been powered by Google’s FeedBurner since pretty much the beginning. However there were some issues:

• It lists out all the deals, and usually only the last 10 deals posted (where we get ~50 deals posted a day).
• Only deals, and OzBargain is more than just a list of deals.
• Not much you can do with turning the look and feel.

So for the last couple of months we have been developing our own in-house email newsletter solution, which moocher announced in August. If you do not have an account on OzBargain (what?!!!), you can still sign up to the new OzBargain newsletter from the front page — the sign up box is on the right hand side under Subscribe to Our Daily Newsletter. However if you are a logged in user, you can go to Settings – newsletter for more fine tuning.

You get:

• Top deals posted over the last 24 hours.
• New forum posts
• New comments in your commented posts (registered users only)
• Deal reminders (registered user only)

Delivery started at 7AM Sydney time every morning so you can check out some of the best deals before work :)

Google+ pages for business was introduced yesterday, and now OzBargain is on Google+ :)

It is still not as flexible and useful as our Facebook page yet. Moreover Google+ has been pretty vacuum currently — great place to post something guaranteeing no one is going to see it. But anyway, I am a Google fanboi so here we have it, and we’ll figure out what to do with it… Later.

Spotted an interesting article at SmartCompany today: Australia’s eCommerce superstars.

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?

I LOVE Redroom DVD, especially for their free Tuesday deals (where you usually can get their coupon codes on OzBargain). One of their kiosk machine is within 10 minutes of walking distance from my place, and 1 DVD is probably the maximum I can watch these days due to general busyness.

It did make me wonder sometimes, that how Redroom DVD can be sustainable with some many cheapskates like me. Maybe I have overestimate the percentage of cheapskates in Australia (which means a lot of work to do here at OzBargain to convert them :) Or maybe they do make money from those at OzBargain, sometimes…

You see. I have been using Redroom DVD for quite a few times now and have never paid them a cent (they do have my credit card details)… Except yesterday. Being a cheapskate does not mean you are immune from forgetfulness. Borrowed The Social Network on Tuesday (great movie by the way), intended to return it on the next day, but only remembered at 7:15PM on Wednesday!

So there you go — $2.99 to Redroom DVD for being forgetful. Well worth it though for how much I have enjoyed their deals so far.