I spent the past year creating Price Hipster, a product search engine and price watching website for the OzBargain community!

Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 01/11/2015 - 11:45
Last edited 13/11/2015 - 12:45

Update 13/11/15: Thanks everyone for the support and feedback! I realise there are heaps of comments here and no one wants to read through them all. If you have a suggestion, it has probably already been raised. I'm currently working on a big update and I'll be sure to let you all know when I release it. I'll be keen to get further feedback and suggestions then. :-)

Hi fellow OzBargainers!

I've spent the past year creating a powerful tool for you all.

https://www.pricehipster.com.au/

These are the reasons I created Price Hipster:

  1. Searching for products across multiple stores is painful. Sometimes you don't even know which stores to check for a product. Wouldn't it be great to conveniently search all stores from one place?

  2. Even if you want to find a product in one particular store, most store websites are very bad at searching their own products, and they're slow at it.

  3. There is no convenient way to find out the previous prices of products, making it difficult to hold vendors accountable for false claims of discounts. Some products vary wildly in price. Some change price nearly every day. For example:

https://www.pricehipster.com.au/product?id=NJNmxsZ3k5n

I really appreciate those OzBargainers who have taken the time to use internet archives to dig up previous prices, but it's less than ideal, and hopefully will now be a thing of the past!

Price Hipster currently includes 5 websites in its index. That will expand in the near future.

Questions for you all:

  1. Which stores should be added next?

  2. OzBargainers in Western Australia, how is the search latency for you? The search servers are in Sydney. I live in Brisbane and the search is pretty much instantaneous here.

If you find any issues with the website or have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

General Discussion

Related Stores

Price Hipster
Price Hipster

Comments

  • sintro on 14/12/2017 - 22:00
    +1

    my mistake

  • shapers on 17/03/2018 - 11:32

    Are the sex toys going to be a regular thing on it?
    Going to have to watch where i open pricehipster these days!

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 17/03/2018 - 11:35

      Which store? I'm adding a huge number of new stores today and I might have missed marking an adult store as "unsafe".

      • shapers on 17/03/2018 - 11:36

        All good, thanks for the continued additions! :) its lovehoney.com.au

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 17/03/2018 - 11:38

          Actually I did mark that one as "unsafe" about 20 minutes ago. Now I have to work out why it's still returning results with safe search. It might just be a caching issue and take a few more minutes.

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 17/03/2018 - 11:48

          It seems to be okay now. Lovehoney is now hidden behind the safe search filter.

  • Olokun on 19/03/2018 - 13:13

    Great work.

    I didn’t know that Sanity was still a thing. Also isn’t Android Enjoyed a dodgy seller? Or at least one with less then favourable reviews

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 19/03/2018 - 13:23

      Yeah apparently it is.

      If you can point me towards some solid evidence Android Enjoyed is dodgy I'll remove them. I don't tolerate dodgy retailers on Price Hipster and have removed others in the past when I found out they were dodgy.

      • Olokun on 19/03/2018 - 15:34

        Permanently Banned on OzBargain

        50% of votes on Product Review are 1/5 stars

        Also the usually high number of buyer beware threads on Whirlpool

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 19/03/2018 - 16:21

          Ah. I didn't add Camera Sky for that reason. It seems Android Enjoyed is in the same bucket. I'll remove them now. Thanks for the heads-up.

  • franky82 on 10/04/2018 - 20:33

    Hi Jazoom
    I've just discovered Price Hipster and have already recommended it to friends- I wish I'd found it sooner.

    I was wondering if you guys had any plans to add chemist warehouse to the database. I find it's generally cheaper for a wide range of toiletries, and it would be great to be able to track their specials.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 10/04/2018 - 20:47

      Hey mate, glad to have you on board.

      I'd also like for Chemist Warehouse to be on Price Hipster but when I contacted them about it they didn't reply. Every time someone asks me about Chemist Warehouse I suggest they post on their Facebook page or something to ask them to get on Price Hipster. If every person who asked me about Chemist Warehouse actually did that I'm sure they'd be on board by now.

      • franky82 on 10/04/2018 - 21:01
        +1

        Excellent point- they may need some convincing to get on board. I will find some time to facebook them.

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 10/04/2018 - 21:05
          +1

          Sweet. I am working on some technology to make this unnecessary but it's very complex and will take a while.

  • ax1 on 12/04/2018 - 16:39

    HI, your site is great! When does it usually updated? Is it random or specific time of a day?

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 12/04/2018 - 16:41
      +1

      Hi ax1. It's usually multiple times per day.

  • neerav on 25/04/2018 - 11:02

    Great site thanks :-)

    Is it possible to index Bing Lee ?

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 25/04/2018 - 17:48

      Hi Neerav. We'd love to get Bing Lee on board but we don't have a product feed for them. Perhaps you could let them know here that you want to see their products on Price Hipster?

  • indium on 28/04/2018 - 10:21

    Good to see Dan Murphy's has made a return to Price Hipster :) Keep up the good work!

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 28/04/2018 - 13:30

      Thanks mate

  • follow on 23/06/2018 - 14:02

    Hi
    Great site. Do you know why the price history resets? Sometimes you only see the history of the last month

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 23/06/2018 - 17:02

      Can you give me an example?

  • wisdomtooth on 29/07/2018 - 15:10

    The interface could do with some improvement:

    1. Aggregate products of different sizes and colours into single entry.

    2. Show results in multiple columns (two on mobile screens).

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 29/07/2018 - 15:16
      +1

      Hi Wisdomtooth.

      1. This indeed happens for products the system has sufficient data for to work it out. For example: https://pricehipster.com/product/fOTgngLy_vOHINdX56W2dg~S15H…

      2. There are multiple columns as long as your browser isn't super outdated. On smaller screens there will not be more than 1 column.

      • wisdomtooth on 29/07/2018 - 15:57

        1. Then it could be working better. Just look at all those repeated Bonds, Tarocash and Cotton On listings.

        2. Just tried it on Chrome, Firefox and Opera for Android, all up-to-date. Single column with wide blank spaces on each side of the pic in each listing.

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 29/07/2018 - 16:41

          1. Yes, I am aware of this. You're correct that it could be (and should be) better. It's not an easy thing to fix. All those products even have different names.

          2. Yes, on small devices there will be one column. Always. For all browsers. There will be blank space beside most images. Images are of all different aspect ratios. It's mathematically impossible to make them all the same without cropping them.

        • wisdomtooth on 29/07/2018 - 17:06

          1. They have the same vendor url, though, don't they?

          2. You can always take the best fit to any given rectangle. Right now you're wasting valuable screen estate. You can take good design pointers from literally millions of shopping sites. On the desktop, which most people use to work rather than retail therap… uhum… bargain hunting, the user can zoom in and out (best for me, on a 13" display, is 67%), but then the font is illegible. On the mobile, we are faced with literally hundreds of redundant listings (same, same, but different — colour and size), with practically half the screen blank. It's a veeeeery low information-to-noise ratio.

          But, your call, @jazoom. I'm just chipping in for your benefit.

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 29/07/2018 - 17:20

          @wisdomtooth:

          1. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes the URL changes. Is it a new product? Is it the same product with a new URL? Did the store change so that now variations have different URLs? Did the store change so that now variations all share the same URL and the selected variation is now handled with session state?

          2. It's a balance, I know. I appreciate the feedback.

  • wisdomtooth on 29/07/2018 - 16:01

    I've found (and reported) quite a few outated (either expired or out-of-stock) listings. Not sure how hard it is to scrape that info from the vendor sites, so alternatively you could try scraping it from here.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 29/07/2018 - 16:44

      I've found (and reported) quite a few outated (either expired or out-of-stock) listings.

      Thank you for doing that. I see all these reports and invalidate any products that have incorrect data. Sometimes it's just a matter of waiting a couple of hours until the next crawl. Sometimes the store has obviously stuffed up.

      Not sure how hard it is to scrape that info from the vendor sites

      Extremely difficult to get it perfect. In fact, no one's scraping is perfect. Frequently Google's search results are terrible, and they have seemingly unlimited money and 150000 employees.

      • wisdomtooth on 29/07/2018 - 17:10

        So, yeah, the point of my comment was to suggest that you try scraping that info from here, since it's already vetted by hundreds of actual users and admins, with seemingly unlimited spare time ;D

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 29/07/2018 - 17:23
          +1

          Price Hipster indexes about 22 million products per day (7.5 million 3 times per day). I doubt OzBargain has anything that will make a significant difference to that. Furthermore, that would add the almost impossible challenge of matching up the few products on OzBargain for that day with the products in Price Hipster's database.

          Price Hipster also has thousands of actual users, and good people such as yourself help by flagging issues.

  • deelaroo on 22/08/2018 - 23:24

    Hi, just curious as to how PriceHipster works with Amazon AU? Seems clearly not all products showing or being tracked, almost like just what people using the PriceHipster add ins have visited? Just some insight would be helpful for my sanity! Thanks

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 23/08/2018 - 08:33
      +1

      Not just that, but that's a big part of it. The reality is Amazon has (or claims to have) more products than all other stores combined and I haven't yet gotten around to creating something that can keep all of the prices updated. Also, Amazon rejected Price Hipster for an affiliate relationship because Price Hipster maintains a price history on products. That is not a negotiable point for me. The price history is a big part of what makes Price Hipster useful. So, it's not economically viable at the moment for me to get all of Amazon's products on there.

      • wisdomtooth on 25/08/2018 - 10:49

        That's odd… So they run sales and don't want anyone to know? o.0

        • Xiaomi on 25/08/2018 - 18:10

          I mean really without that, you'd just be indexing their products. Pointless.

      • deelaroo on 25/08/2018 - 18:12

        Just curious what is "economically viable"? Like is there a huge compute/hosting cost involved? Bandwidth costs? Do they just start blocking you or something if you pull too much from them?

        (really just curious).

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 25/08/2018 - 19:24
          +1

          Compute/hosting/bandwidth are not a problem at all. It's more the "start blocking" part. Web crawlers need to have a lot of IP addresses to regularly crawl very large websites. Websites tend to allow Google's IP addresses and limit/block all other IP addresses, including those of other search engine crawlers, for example. It perpetuates the Google monopoly. The only way around it is to have a crap load of IP addresses. I have access to a few thousand, but I don't think they're gonna cut it.

  • TAAMM on 06/09/2018 - 07:53

    Hi

    Is there anyway that u can do same thing for United state stores.???

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 06/09/2018 - 08:11

      Hi Taamm, are you in USA or you just purchase from them frequently?

  • tryagain on 21/09/2018 - 17:16

    Hi, I have checked through and can't see anyone who has suggested 4wd Supercentre so not sure if you have approached them or not, they tend to have prices that bounce around like kid on a jumping castle so Price Hipster would be great to see what has happened with their prices previously, not sure if they would want to play ball but it would be great if they did.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 21/09/2018 - 17:45
      +1

      Haha. Usually I quote the user who requested the store when I shoot off a message to the retailer, but I don't think this message would be very encouraging to them.

      • tryagain on 21/09/2018 - 18:55

        I am an existing customer of theirs so you could maybe put that in instead or I'd be happy to PM you my name.

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 21/09/2018 - 18:58

          Actually, it seems to work better if you reach out to them directly. People these days have a reflex where they immediately ignore anything they perceive to be marketing, so when I reach out to them they think I'm trying to sell them something. But the reality is, all retailers benefit from being on Price Hipster.

        • tryagain on 21/09/2018 - 19:26

          @jazoom: Very true I run a small business and immediately switch off whenever I get a call about a business offering some form of marketing services, in my defence, I might have been more engaged for the first hundred or so but after that it gets pretty old pretty quickly. I'll message them on Facebook now.

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 21/09/2018 - 19:48

          @tryagain: Thanks mate. Good luck. I'm happy to have them on Price Hipster.

  • zzymurgy on 25/09/2018 - 12:03

    Many thanks for this site, it's saved me so much money.

    I can't believe you provide it free of charge. Do you have a preferred way for grateful users to show their appreciation?

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 25/09/2018 - 12:15

      I'm glad to hear it zzymurgy. That's what keeps me going.

      Probably just letting other people know about it so they can save money too is the best way to show appreciation. Also, the more users Price Hipster has, the more stores come on board.

  • sintro on 28/09/2018 - 18:49

    How come this woolies item is not showing on pricehipster?
    https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/769459/per…

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 28/09/2018 - 18:53

      It would appear the crawler hasn't seen it for a while. I'll keep an eye on it.

  • Xiaomi on 29/09/2018 - 03:03

    Hi,

    I'm trying to work out why my price alert hasn't been triggered several times, as prices have gone below my notification setting.

    Any suggestions?

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 29/09/2018 - 07:38

      Please send me a private message with your email address and the URL of the product on Price Hipster. You can copy that from the URL bar when looking at the product in your price alerts dashboard.

      I'll investigate for you.

  • one8two on 28/10/2018 - 10:47

    Hello,

    I've just noticed that all of my Woolworths price alerts have disappeared and aren't appearing when I search for them. It appears that all Woolworths products have vanished from the website. Do you no longer support price alerts for Woolworths products?

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 28/10/2018 - 13:50

      Should be back now. Thanks for letting me know.

      • one8two on 28/10/2018 - 19:26

        Thank you! They're all back. In case you are unaware, the images for all Coles items are also not appearing.

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 28/10/2018 - 19:38

          Yes. It seems that's because Coles has recently implemented some very user-hostile changes to their website. You can't access anything of theirs without first visiting it with a browser with JavaScript enabled. You'll notice it hangs for a while when you first access their website (and about every 30 minutes after that). It's running a script to see if they'll serve you the resources.

          I'll look at hosting the images on Price Hipster's servers.

          If you want to force the images to show, visit Coles' website so the scripts run in your browser, then the images should show up on Price Hipster since they've fingerprinted your browser and deemed it as being okay.

          • one8two on 29/10/2018 - 08:52

            @jazoom: Gotcha! Thanks for all of your help :)

            • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 29/10/2018 - 09:42

              @one8two: My pleasure

  • BargainCowboy on 27/11/2018 - 11:30

    I used the app on Android 6, but upgraded to Android 8 and it uninstalled itself and cannot find it on the Play Store. Any reason for that?

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 27/11/2018 - 11:59
      +1

      There never was an app and it never was on the Play Store. What you might have had was a shortcut to the web app. Android offers to do that for websites that use a service worker. Caching issues were causing more problems than they were worth so I got rid of the service worker. The "app" you speak of was essentially just a bookmark for the website.

      • BargainCowboy on 27/11/2018 - 13:17

        Wow. I must be losing it. Unfortunately I already reset my old phone, so I can't check it, but it was definitely not a bookmark. Anyway, is there any app planned then?

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 27/11/2018 - 13:23
          +1

          The fact that you were using the website and thought it was an app suggests to me the website is sufficient.

          Yes, they are essentially cached bookmarks to a website. Android just makes them look and kinda behave like an app (no URL bar, for example).

          I have thought of making an app, but I'm not sure how much value it would bring. What do you think?

          • BargainCowboy on 27/11/2018 - 14:10

            @jazoom: So wait, just to confirm it was indeed what you suggest it was, how can I restore this bookmark? I thought it was great, so in that case an app is not needed.

            • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 27/11/2018 - 20:22

              @BargainCowboy: It's really up to the operating system what it lets you do and how it makes things look. I don't know what flavour of Android you have but I don't think you'll get exactly the same behaviour as before (due to no service worker). You might be able to add a website shortcut to your home page, which will essentially be the same functionality you had before. If your OS doesn't allow that, I'm sure you can find an app which adds that ability.

  • fredblogs on 27/11/2018 - 21:01

    Curious what made you decide to go password-less. I don't think I've seen that on any other website.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 27/11/2018 - 21:05

      It's more secure. It's what I decided at the time. I might use passwords if I did it all over again, but passwordless has worked great.

      Medium.com uses passwordless logins. It's not common, though, mainly because people stick with what's familiar.

  • K1LL3R12 on 17/01/2019 - 15:02

    Put of curiosity, is there a way to get a daily email function rather then the individual emails all throughout the day?
    I was hoping that on Wednesday after the Woolworths and Coles catelogues have change that then we'd get a whole list of everything that is under the price alerts set value. This would just make life a little easier as at this current moment in time I have a waste email that grabs them all and puts them into a list for me instead, but it's not as nice.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 17/01/2019 - 16:57

      Hey mate. I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean. There is a daily deals email, which is daily. There are price alerts, which happen when they happen.

      • K1LL3R12 on 17/01/2019 - 17:34

        Basically a culmination of all the price alerts for the day (I'm thinking from Woolworths and Coles especially after Wednesday change over) sent instead of individual ones (or perhaps a switch setting to choose). Basically the daily email but for all the price alerts.
        I know that there are often about 10 different emails I get for each individual price alert. Right now I've got an email parser that puts them all into an email that sends as a daily email instead.

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 18/01/2019 - 09:37

          Sorry, I guess I made a new comment instead of replying. Please see the below comment.

  • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 18/01/2019 - 09:37

    I see. That's an interesting idea. Most people don't have so many price alerts that it's an issue, but I can see why it'd be useful for you. One of the reasons I don't think it'd be a good idea is that if the crawler detects the price change at 1610, and your alert email was sent at 1607, then you will not find out about the price drop for 24 hours, and by then the price might have gone back up or the product sold out.

    I know that there are often about 10 different emails I get for each individual price alert.

    There should only ever be one email for each individual alert. If you're getting duplicates, that is certainly not right and you should give me details.

  • Bad Wolf on 23/01/2019 - 14:38

    Hey Jazoom

    Not sure if it’s just me but all Myer stock seems to have disappeared.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 23/01/2019 - 18:23
      +1

      Not just you. There's an issue (with Myer) I need to look into that I thought I already fixed. Thanks for mentioning it. Hopefully I get it sorted tonight.

  • rocketpoweredmice on 25/01/2019 - 22:36

    Bunnings power tools listings seemed to have vanished as well, is this permanent?

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 26/01/2019 - 09:39

      Shouldn't be. The crawler probably just didn't see them for a couple of days.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 26/02/2019 - 21:29

      Probably because it doesn't have a price until you select a size. The crawler doesn't know how to do that for Target, it seems.

      • fredblogs on 01/04/2019 - 19:45

        "The crawler" - is that your crawler? :)

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 01/04/2019 - 21:14

          Yup

  • 0FoxGiven on 22/03/2019 - 13:20

    hey man… just came to say: Thank you for this tool!

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 24/03/2019 - 16:45

      Hey thanks heaps. :-)

      I'm glad you're finding it useful.

  • dy4me on 04/04/2019 - 06:07

    Just wanted to check but it doesn't look like Pricehipster includes Supercheap Auto?

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 04/04/2019 - 07:06

      Not at present

  • O O on 04/04/2019 - 13:04

    Hi Jazoom,

    I'm not sure it's my hallucination?! Isn't the store, Spotlight, in the database?

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 06/04/2019 - 11:38

      Not presently. They've moved to a new platform and that platform has been having trouble getting its act together.

      • O O on 06/04/2019 - 11:47

        Yeh, it's tough to keep up with such a variety of platforms. Anyway, I appreciate your effort, thanks a lots. 👍👍👍

        I'm curious if you are the sole developer?

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 06/04/2019 - 11:49
          +1

          Thanks for the support! Yes, I do it all myself at the moment.

  • one8two on 13/05/2019 - 17:53

    Hi Jazoom,

    I've noticed all Nivea branded products have disappeared from Price Hipster for Woolworths and Coles.
    This could possibly be happening with other brands too but I specifically noticed a few Nivea products missing from my dashboard and I noticed they no longer appear when I search for them on the home page.

    Absolutely love using the site by the way. Keep up the great work!

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 13/05/2019 - 20:50
      +1

      Hey mate, I guess they're mostly back since I just scrolled through hundreds of them: https://pricehipster.com/?q=nivea&stores=BkG5opaa,HJA-haTp

      Thanks for the kind words. If they disappeared from your price alerts list it'll be because the crawler thought they were missing. They should come back eventually if they still exist on the website and are in stock.

      • one8two on 14/05/2019 - 10:00

        Yep, definitely back! Sorry, not sure what happened there.

        Thanks again!

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 14/05/2019 - 17:31

          No probs. Thanks for the report.

  • shamid202 on 14/05/2019 - 14:13
    +1

    I use your website a lot thank you

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 14/05/2019 - 17:31
      +1

      I'm glad to hear it. Thank you for the kind words.

  • GangGang on 23/05/2019 - 15:01

    Why does it say your store is banned on ozbargain?

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 23/05/2019 - 17:58
      +1

      Here's a conversation between me and an OzBargain mod 2 years ago:

      Me: "Hey, I just randomly saw that Price Hipster is banned. I've no idea how long that's been, but I find it curious. What's the go?"

      Mod: "All price comparison and similar sites have been blocked so that people link directly to the deal (e.g. Coles). Then they should credit Price Hipster or whoever in the description."

      I have no idea why OzBargain insists on using the word "banned", since it's obviously confusing, since I had to ask about it myself, and now it's giving you the wrong impression. I'm sure plenty of others are confused by it as well.

      • Olokun on 23/05/2019 - 18:39

        Speaking of Coles.. where'd it go?

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 23/05/2019 - 18:42
          +11

          Coles is currently being hostile to the Price Hipster crawler. I can't say when they'll be back, but now is a good time to support Woolworths, which has always been more accommodating.

          • fredblogs on 24/05/2019 - 11:16

            @jazoom: Intentionally being hostile or through incompetence?

            • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 25/05/2019 - 12:57
              +5

              @fredblogs: Well, it's essentially hostile to all their users. If you load up a Coles web page it takes a while to load because they do a bunch of analytics on you, your IP address, your operating system and your browser. If they don't like what they see they don't let you use the site.

              I'm sure they have their reasons, but they're just shooting themselves in the foot by making a crappy website and not getting the benefit of Price Hipster's price alerts for their customers.

              • sintro on 30/05/2019 - 13:06

                @jazoom: That's right, if I don't see the items I want on sale at Coles anymore then I guess I won't be buying from them!

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