One of the best deal posted yesterday — Kingston DataTraveler USB Drive $1 Postage from ShoppingSquare, which brought their 4GB version as low as $16.95 delivered.

It’s also great to see a bit of “competition” over there at OzBargain. We have Deals Direct offering the same drive at $22.95 + free delivery. Then Top Buy countered it by offering it $19.95 + free delivery. And now it’s $15.95 + $1 postage from ShoppingSquare — great to see a free market works for the consumers!

No one asked for it but I have just implemented a small feature on OzBargain that I think would be very useful for store owners — full RSS feed on deals and comments posted on OzBargain, against the domain name of your store. I think it will be very valuable for store owners/representatives to keep track on what has been posted on OzBargain, especially now it includes all the comments regarding your store as well. Many OzBargain visitors don’t realise that we are not representing the merchants listed here, and many presume that the store owner will read their comments/support questions they posted on OzBargain!! Therefore it might be useful to subscribe to the feed concerning your store so you don’t miss out on all the discussions.

To access the feed for your store, use the following URL:

http://www.ozbargain.com.au/deals/<your-domain.com.au>/fullfeed

For example for Catch of the Day, it would be

http://www.ozbargain.com.au/deals/catchoftheday.com.au/fullfeed

You’ll see all the comments have title prefixed with “Re: “. See any comment that sparks questions? Any enquiry that has not been replied? Any trolls attempt to confuse others with mis-information (well, you might wish to contact us directly regarding that)? Now you can jump straight in and add your input as the store representative.

OzBargain is a gathering place of consumers and merchants. While I have pretty much been developing this website with shoppers and bargain hunters in mind, I do wish to provide a good online tool to establish communications between shoppers and merchants.

Thanks to Shan for posting this — Kmart Storewide 15% off 29-31 August when you use the attached flyer. It includes Kmart Tyre & Auto Service, but does not include LCD TV’s, iPods, iTunes, games consoles, recharge, Gift Cards & cigarette products.

From the file name I believe it might be one of those Wesfarmers team member discount voucher. That means it’s 15% on top of whatever is already on special this weekend. Limit one per customer. You will need to print out the PDF file, and then present this flyer to get the discount.

You can check out this weekend’s catalogue here. Men’s clothing and footwear is already 20-30% off — add 15% to that! There are plenty of bargains to be found when you scan through the catalogue + 15% off.

Happy shopping!

I think we have already found the winner for this week’s competition. I thought yesterday’s deal, 1 million free air fare from AsiaAir was pretty good and jdoung was going to win this week’s comp. It turns out there are actually more people preferring freebies than cheap airfare!

Thanks to Purt for posting this. 7-Eleven is giving away 15,000 free pieces!! All you need to do is to put in your email address, and they will send you a unique code to redeem your free pie at a 7-11 store near you!

We already have reviews on beef piece and chicken pie. They taste like any cheap $3 pies — but I guess the fact that they are free would make them taste better. I’ve got my code but I haven’t had a chance to redeem it yet — pie for afternoon tea tomorrow?

Lasoo.com.au, backed by an ASX listed company, has launched a new social sharing site — u.Lasoo. The basic principle is simple — you register, you submit deals, you vote for the submissions you like, and you comment on them. Yes, just like OzBargain and a growing number of independent bargain sharing sites in Australia.

There are two main things that are new on u.Lasoo but not available on OzBargain and other sites —

1. Integration with the main Lasoo site, where visitors can post items directly from inside the catalogue. Even a visitor can do that.

2. Members can earn money from their Google AdSense account. If you have a publisher ID, you can paste in and Google Ads with your publisher ID will be shown on the deals that you have posted.

I think (2) and the very idea of “making money online” can be quite attractive. From their FAQ page it is a bit ambiguous — of course as a publisher you are getting 100% of Google AdSense revenue that goes into your account. However I guess they meant to say that your ads will get 100% exposure, i.e. they will not rotate with their own ads, like many other profit-sharing sites (like RetailMeNot who does 50%). But don’t quote me that on.

Good idea? Maybe. Maybe not.

Like Angus has said in his LifeHacker post, you might not earn a lot of money from it. But I guess a lot is rather subjective. It might mean $10/month to some (like most sites running AdSense). Meanwhile someone might want to be the next Markus Frind earning 5 figures per day. But hey, anything is better than nothing!

However, the “revenue generation device”, i.e. Google AdSense, is not available to everyone. In order to have an AdSense account, you must have an established website that Google is happy for you to monetise. So at the end the site might be dominated by website owners as they have higher incentive to post.

But it is not my biggest problem with running an AdSense profit-sharing site. My biggest problem is — click frauds. Once you let people providing their own publisher code, there bound to be someone who wants to speed up the money-earning process by clicking on his own ads. Well, that’s Google’s problem, and they are usually pretty good at catching this kind of fraudulent activities — and they will ban the account for life. Now, Google also detects repeat offenders by association (so they can’t get back into the system), and sharing the same site as other banned accounts might just be enough to trigger the alarm — it’s not the kind of risk that I would like to take.

Well. Some people might think I am spreading FUD here because Lasoo has suddenly turned from a sponsor (they bought quite a bit of placement ads on OzBargain via AdSense) to a competitor. I guess it’s true — I am freaking out! Well, not really but I know Lasoo’s marketing budget is infinitely bigger than OzBargain (well, anything divided by 0 is infinity). They have got a great looking site. And they have more friends on Facebook than OzBargain (c’mon, show your support here!) OzBargain still has advantage in features and community, but both can be fixed with $$$.

We’ll see. The bargain sharing space in Australia might be very different 12 months from now.

Update — Ray asked “Are they running a script or in-house developed?”

I had a look at their site structure and I think u.Lasoo is running a modified version of Kigg, is a “Digg like application developed with ASP.NET MVC Framework, LINQ to SQL and ASP.NET AJAX”. Obviously they have done up the template, added the integration with their catalogue system, etc. Always a good idea to check existing scripts if you want the speed to market.

I also suspect that this Newcastle company developed u.Lasoo.

I’ve never travelled with AirAsia before — two kids with no on board entertainment system for 8 hours from Sydney to an Asian city is probably going to be unbearable. However for those who want to take the challenge and are already planning ahead for the holidays in 2009Q2, you simply cannot beat their latest 0 fare deal (thanks to jduong for posting).

Book your ticket from 26 to 31 August for flights in quarter 2 next year, to multiple destinations in Asia. All you need to pay is airport tax and other fees. Fare is totally free, and someone has already booked 5 return tickets at $370 per person!

Now I just need a holiday…

For those who are not familiar with PayPal-Offers.com.au, it is basically a PayPal promotion site, listing merchants/online retailers that offer PayPal as a payment method, and their current specials if you make a purchase with PayPal. Throughout the year special offers are usually matched up with the holidays. Some retailers might give you free delivery, and some might give you a special discount or gifts when you pay with PayPal. It’s a site to check regularly (although PayPal does send you an email every time they have updated the website — a few days later). We also usually post PayPal related deals at OzBargain with the “PayPal” tag.

Father’s Day is coming (7 September this year), and PayPal too has pushed their affiliated merchants with these deals:

• Free Shipping at OO.com.au
• Free Shipping at dStore
• Free Shipping at Dinosaur Deal
• Free Sandisk MP3 Player at ShoppingSquare

More can be found at PayPal-Offers.com.au. Remember — not all dads like power-tools, BBQ gears or engine oils (typical stereo-typing gifts for Father’s Day). I’ll take gadgets from those department stores any day :)

Every now and then someone would want sell something on OzBargain. I have been hesitated to create a market place on OzBargain, because

• Work work work! To have a “proper” market place for people to trade and swap, I need to do more coding. But I am still struggling to squeeze time to implement features that people have requested yonks ago…
• Create a fair market place is hard. Look at eBay and the amount of fraud associated with it. I simply do not have the resource to ensure every user/item listed is legit.
• Spamming. You create something and they will come. And they suck.
• We already have eBay, OZtion and other auction shops. We also have craigslist and gumtree where you can find people to swap things with. There is also a new Sydney-based startup OurSwaps.com (whom I will review later) for this very purpose. Why do we need another market place?

But then someone reckoned that a market place at OzBargain is gonna to be big. So I quickly hacked up a new forum for the OzBargain members to sell or swap — completely free! However make you you read the selling/swapping guideline first.

Will you trade or swap at OzBargain?

Guys at Pingdom has written an interesting comparison on Apple pricing between US, Europe and Australia. Like the Big Mac Index, their “Apple Price Index” used the price of Apple products to calculate the purchasing power parity of nations.

How we compared the prices

We looked at the prices for 17 Apple hardware products (computers) as well as the price of Mac OS X and Office 2008 for Mac.

The comparison is between US, Europe (average prices from Sweden, UK, Spain, Germany and France) and Australia. As a Swedish company, Pingdom quickly found out how much they have over-paid for their beloved Macs and iPods. However, I guess the only reason I can think of that they have included Australia in comparison is that they can feel good about themselves.

We thought we had it bad here in Sweden, but when we looked at the prices for Macs in Australia we couldn’t help but feel a bit sorry for them.

Australians pay a whopping 26.5% more on average for their Macs compared to Americans. For a thousand-dollar product, that is an additional $265 that an Australian would have to pay compared to an American. And that’s US dollars, not Australian.

Ouch.

Pingdom tried to answer the question “why such a big difference?” I don’t think there’s anything satisfactory except accepting the fact that the Australian market is much smaller than US or Europe. Therefore when you factor in the infrastructure cost (store, personnel, warehouse, etc) there is a higher overhead selling Mac in Australia than in US. Fortunately you can still buy from US using services such as PriceUSA — you pay the US price + shipping to Australia + fee for PriceUSA + tax if applicable.

Recent flux in AUD-USD currency exchange can also contribute to the reason why us Aussies are paying so much for Apple products. $1 AUD was exchanging $0.985 USD merely 5 weeks ago, but now it has fallen to $0.87 USD — 12% drop! Definitely not looking forward to see rises in the coming weeks as retailers “adjusts” their prices.

Finally — there are some clear mistakes in Pingdom’s prices. From the Excel file included, 40GB Apple TV was supposed to be AUD $449. However when you actually go to Apple Australia’s online store, $449 is the price for the 160GB version. 40GB is only AUD $329! Maybe Apple Australia has dropped the price by $120 over the last few days?

Anyway. The conclusion — Aussies are being ripped off, which is one of the reasons why OzBargain exists.

Just saw that both OzBargain and MoneyBackCo have been featured on Sydney Morning Herald, under the Money Section — A click away from bargain bliss.

Coupons OzBargain (www.ozbargain.com.au) started as the personal blog of Scott Yang in 2005 and has grown into a community of people who post discount coupons found online and in print. He says about 8000 people visit the site daily and, while the legitimacy of the postings is not checked, the community is quick to target dodgy material. The site has proved popular enough that some retailers, such as OfficeWorks, have posted to the site directly. The “freebies” and “forums” areas are great for tips.

Cash back Many websites offer money to sites that refer customers. MoneyBackCo (www.moneybackco.com) refunds those payments to its members by tracking purchases through web “cookies”. Offers are available in just about every category from arts to travel. Membership is $10 but that is deducted from the refunds you earn. Founder Steve Ford says the site, launched early last year, has already refunded about $40,000 to its 1700 members. BankWest, Harris Technology and Lonely Planet are among its 981 merchants.

It was written by Herald’s tech journalist Conrad Walters. Thank you very much! However there are some more details to what has been mentioned in the article.

• This blog (Bargain Blog) was started in 2005 but wasn’t really my personal blog (I blogged elsewhere since 2000/2001).
• 8,000/day is the unique visitors which translate to around 11,000 visits/day. I know some of you guys are addicted!
• OfficeWorks don’t post on OzBargain directly. I do know one OW employee who posted but that was quite a while ago. The best deals are actually usually shared by keen bargain hunters.

It’s also great to see MoneyBackCo doing well, and they have just released their new look. Congratulation to Steve!

Back in May this year ozpete raised an issue in the forums regarding to on-going deals, as some deals/coupons don’t really expire and are still very useful after a year or two. However due to the design of OzBargain where new items push the older ones away from the front page, those older deals somehow “got lost” inside the archive of past deals. After all listing items in reverse chronological order is not always the best solution to organise information (in fact it’s probably one of the worst ways if you emphasis on “organising”). So at the end the conclusion was — OzBargain needs something to organise its increasing worth of information. Preferably a Wiki:

A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia, is one of the best-known wikis. Wikis are used in business to provide intranets and Knowledge Management systems.

Hmm. Knowledge management system that is edited collaboratively by all members — that sounds like something would be very useful to OzBargain. So 3 freaking months after that forum thread was posted, let me introduce to you:

OzBargain Wiki, the BargainPedia!

We’ve Got The Software…

Actually it took me only one week to integrate DokuWiki with Drupal that powers OzBargain (templates + a special authentication handler). DokuWiki is an open source light-weight PHP-based Wiki software that uses flat-files instead of database to store its pages, and I’ve used it for a few different projects previous. I was going to try integrating MediaWiki (the software that drives Wikipedia) but I found it’s too complicated and too heavy-weight for a small site like OzBargain.

Anyway. DokuWiki is pretty fast for a small site, has a good indexing for search, and its plugins are easy to write so I’ll be able to mash up the content from the deal listing, forums and the wiki together in the future. OzBargain Wiki was installed and integrated in early May and was just there, and no one has noticed…

But We Have No Content

The initial plan was — I will get the Wiki installed, and write a few essential pages because we release this to the wild. But the problem was, due to my own busyness I never managed to write those pages. So an almost-empty Wiki was just sitting there collecting dust (or wasting electrons) for the last 3 months…

So I figured, if I am going to wait until I have written all the pages, the Wiki will probably be released later than Duke Nukem Forever. As a believer of the open source philosophy, I think it might be wise to release early and release often even the beta feature of your website. So what the heck. Here is OzBargain Wiki. Play with it. Don’t spam it. Make it useful.

Initially this wiki is going to be a supplement to deals posted on OzBargain, but ultimately I am hoping to use this wiki to collect and organise information regarding to shopping and finding bargains in Australia.

Now, getting back to do more editing…

Thanks to dmiller for posting this Fuji Xerox Laser Printer deal from City Software, where you can get Fuji Xerox DocuPrint C1110B for $129.95 after their $200 cashback promotions! The same promotion applies to DocuPrint C2090FS Multifunction Printer.

That makes DocuPrint C1110B one of the cheapest colour laser printer around. I actually bought my mum a Xerox multifunction laser printer back in May and the print quality is excellent for a multifunction at that price range so I won’t be hesitated to recommend Xerox (these guys invented Laser printer 40 years ago anyway)…

Big thanks to Trudy for posting this deal — Target 10% Off Team Members Discount, from Thursday 7 August to Saturday 9 August. That’s 10% off anything in Target (other than gift card purchases), including those that are already discounted in the current catalogue.

This is supposed to be for Westfarmers Divisional Team Members. Just print it out and bring it along with you to your local Target store to enjoy this offer.

COVE, a new Australian web hosting company with many not so new faces from ex-Jumba (which this blog was once hosted on many moons ago), is going to give away 2,500 free domain names next Monday (11 August 2008), via their promotional website, TheGreatDomainNameGiveAway.com.au (that domain is about as original as “OzBargain” despite being a lot longer…).

On Monday, August 11, COVE will give away 2,000 gTLD domain names (.com, .net, .org, .biz and .info), along with 500 .AU domain names (.com.au, .net.au and .id.au).

All of these free domain names come with the standard free features you get when buying a domain name from COVE, including DNS hosting, URL re-direction, URL cloaking and e-mail forwarding.

As stated by the rep, they currently use Bottle domain for .au domains and eNom for gTLDs.

Yup. All free. No string attached. I’ve already had quite a few in mind, with availability checked. When Monday comes COVE will post the coupon codes on their website for free domain registration. I am expecting to get none as I usually score pretty low on “luck”. I already have too many domains sitting there collecting dust anyway. Just need time to develop them into something more useful…

It has been more than a month since my previous post — yes I know that I have been slack blogging here. Well, there are quite a few reasons — I have been sick (seriously ill with virus infection), and busy, and generally unmotivated. Anyway. It has been a hiatus but I am back now! Hopefully blog posts here will be more frequent and more regular.

The growth of OzBargain might somehow be related to whether I have been blogging here or not. July 2008 has been the only month so far that there’s no increase of traffic, and that’s the same month which I have not blogged about anything! Time to shift into the promotion gear and get it rolling!