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

  • Gaz1 on 02/11/2015 - 16:06

    Website down? I get the error "ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH"

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 16:58

      Hi, it works for me. Are you using an old, insecure browser by any chance? Price Hipster only works across https so ALL traffic between you and the site is encrypted.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 10/12/2015 - 17:51

      Hi Gaz1. I made some changes so hopefully it'll now be kinda to older SSL versions. More info here.

  • srr on 02/11/2015 - 16:19

    For some products like steaks it's not clear if the price is per kg or per 300g. It'd be great to know a price per standard unit like kg to compare

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 16:59

      That info should be there. Could you please link me to an example?

  • notout50 on 02/11/2015 - 16:22

    Definitely needs more suppliers, but great concept and application so far. How does it work with products that require a 'code at checkout'? As is often the case on OzBargain. Are they included with the final price?
    Speed of search is amazing, instantaneous in Melbourne. Really hope you're all good with the legal side of things.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 17:00
      +1

      There's nothing illegal about search engines, otherwise you'd best not use Google ever.

      Coupons are not taken into account.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 10/12/2015 - 17:53
      +1

      More suppliers added! :)

  • Maple9 on 02/11/2015 - 16:47

    Awesome website. Fast response.
    Keep up the good work!!!

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 17:01

      Will do :-)

  • outlander on 02/11/2015 - 16:52

    Cool, great job! I used to use mildsurprise and priceslice a fair bit before they where shut down. Definitely onto a winner with the speed.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 17:03

      Thanks. I'd never even heard of those sites before. It's a shame they shut down.

      • outlander on 02/11/2015 - 17:11

        Definitely. Just the way it is sometimes, but its too bad because they were really useful. No one wants to pay to search, but in this case I wouldn't mind because it can save you so much money in the long run. If those sites had switched to a bitcoin paytosearch or paytowatchitem type system I would have kept using it, likewise for ad watching or surveys.

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 17:39

          Did they charge a subscription fee? Well rest assured that Price Hipster will not do that.

        • happychild100 on 02/11/2015 - 17:48

          @jazoom: Neither of them did, both quite handy. There was a pretty recent one too. I believe the dev for mildsurprise has been commenting here too.

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 18:35

          @happychild100: Sorry, I misunderstood you.

        • outlander on 02/11/2015 - 22:23

          @jazoom:

          I was just pointing it out as an option. It would never have the same explosive income potential as targetting retailers for sales promotions, but might be enough to keep it running if things start to circle the drain like with the two I mentioned.

          I particularly like the supermarket tracking. Thats new. It means users can pick products they buy regularly, and wait til the price bottoms out before stocking up.

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 03/11/2015 - 15:57
          +1

          @outlander: Money is not really an issue. I don't think you'll have to worry about subscriptions. :-)

        • outlander on 03/11/2015 - 22:38

          @jazoom:
          Never hurts to have a plan b

  • [Deactivated] on 02/11/2015 - 17:27

    I'm in and thank you for all your hard work!

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 17:38

      You're welcome

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 10/12/2015 - 17:54

      Lots more hard work and a big update for you :)

  • harkoliar on 02/11/2015 - 17:43

    Great website!,

    Just a comment,it could be me not looking hard enough, for example Panasonic eneloops mobile booster, I'm struggling to see how much the lowest price was sometime end of Oct. I can only guess its between 10-14 dollars.

    Maybe an option of lowest price displayed of when it occurred?
    https://www.pricehipster.com.au/product?id=NyUklve3k92

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 18:44
      +2

      I'll make the graphs better and hopefully this will be easy for you to find out.

  • hetzjagd on 02/11/2015 - 17:44

    Just scanned through the first page and some of the third page but didn't see this mentioned -

    I'm at work and getting this error when trying to visit in any browser. Other secure sites work fine. In firefox this error comes up

    Secure Connection Failed

    The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.

    The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.

    Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.

    In Internet Explorer its this error

    The proxy server isn't responding

    •Check your proxy settings. Go to Tools > Internet Options > Connections. If you are on a LAN, click "LAN settings".
    •Make sure your firewall settings aren't blocking your web access.
    •Ask your system administrator for help.

    On one hand it is probably something at my works end that is doing it - on the other hand, like I said above, most other secure sites work fine (banking, ozbargain). The errors that I'm seeing for this site, I don't get anything like that on the couple of secure sites that don't work properly - normally they load but just display badly.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 18:46

      The TLS connection to you is actually handled by CloudFlare, which I'm not going to ditch. I may not be able to make your work allow the connection. :(

      Does Reddit work?

      • hetzjagd on 02/11/2015 - 19:50

        It did for a long while but recently they blocked it so I'm not sure if it currently does

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 20:43

          Reddit also uses CloudFlare. ;-)

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 10/12/2015 - 17:55

          Hi hetzjagd. I released a big update today, and I made some changes that should be nicer to older SSL. I hope it works at work for you now!

        • hetzjagd on 10/12/2015 - 20:27

          @jazoom:

          Thanks for the heads up. I'll send the link to work and give it a try and try remember to let you know how it goes

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 10/12/2015 - 20:27

          @hetzjagd: Thanks!

        • hetzjagd on 11/12/2015 - 09:32

          @jazoom:

          Ok cool I can get to the page now and it appears to display correctly however the search doesn't work. This is using IE 11.0.9600.18097 but I tell you what this symptom is most definitely something about being at work and not the site I'm sure.

          I can type in the search field but nothing updates in the search results dynamically or if I try hit enter after what I've typed

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 11/12/2015 - 12:27

          @hetzjagd:

          Strange. Thanks for getting back to me.

  • shamid202 on 02/11/2015 - 17:57

    you should also put refine search option, so i can only search in specific stores in my mind or price lowest to highest, if you can even separate the categories like grocery and electrical that would be gr8 as well. Target is really important as well add that to your search.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 18:47

      thanks for the feedback

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 10/12/2015 - 17:56

      Hi shamid202! I have great pleasure in letting you know that pretty much everything you requested has now been implemented. Have a great day!

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 11/02/2016 - 09:52

      And now everything has. You can now sort from low -> high price. Thanks for your feedback!

      • shamid202 on 03/04/2016 - 23:09

        good on you mate, i always am using your site :)
        also couple of other good stores to compare things like medicines or beauty products is http://www.chemistwarehouse.com.au or priceline

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 03/04/2016 - 23:14

          Those 2 would be good. Hopefully someday. I'm pretty close to releasing some news about new stores so keep an eye out. :-)

  • IgnitionS15 on 02/11/2015 - 18:18

    wow impressive little site that is!

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 18:47

      thanks :)

  • spare13 on 02/11/2015 - 18:18
    +1

    Fantastic work!

    Curious, what technology are you using for searches? They are extremely quick!

  • Jayphen on 02/11/2015 - 18:25

    Nice work man.

    People in this thread LOVE React.js :P

    I have a feeling that you will get IP banned at some point because you're directly linking images from the stores

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 18:49
      +5

      It's your IP that requests the images. Price Hipster just tells your browser where to find them. This is exactly how Google image search works.

  • chefdillu on 02/11/2015 - 18:39

    I just tried it , Love your work, Keep it up mate !
    Would it be possible to even search their ebay stores too
    as I found one deal cheaper on targets ebay site ( with 25 % off) than all others

    http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/181589835806?_trksid=p2060353.m27…

    At the moment I use get my price & my shopping to get the cheapest prices

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 18:51

      I suppose it's possible. It's on my list for consideration.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 10/12/2015 - 18:11

      Hi chefdillu. Just letting you know that there are now 15 stores indexed. Unfortunately no eBay yet.

  • kpm on 02/11/2015 - 18:54
    +2

    Absolutely adore the clean design you have. The reason I don't use sites like myshopping.com.au and shopbot.com.au is because of their clutter. It makes the process so much more difficult than it needs to be. You've alleviated this issue and I love it.
    The price history is also a fantastic idea.
    A possible improvement could be to provide high-res images for your products. I can see that your sourcing product images from the shop's website themselves, hence why you have differences between the images. Just to boost your cleanliness and minimalistic design, would be nice to see some streamlined images. I can understand how this could get out of hand quickly though, in regards to shear multitude of products and such, and I can see more important improvements taking precedence over this. But just a bit of insight from another perfectionist (because you clearly are one).
    Keep up the great work!

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 19:26
      +3

      Thanks. I am a bit of a perfectionist but sometimes I have to make concessions in the name of practicality. ;-)

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 10/12/2015 - 18:13

      Hi kpm! Just letting you know that I released a big update today. I've tried my best to keep the UI as clean as possible.

  • nickmcm on 02/11/2015 - 19:43

    This is such a great site - I cannot believe the speed at which the results are returned. I have bookmarked your site and will use it often and cannot wait until you update with more stores.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 21:56

      Thanks :)

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 10/12/2015 - 18:13

      Now updated with many more stores. :)

  • Gaz1 on 02/11/2015 - 19:46

    Not sure if its been mentioned, but two features that would be nice is sorting (primarily by price) & "list" mode (instead of tiles).

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 11/02/2016 - 09:53

      Sorting has been added, Gaz1. Thanks for your suggestion!

  • deanylev on 02/11/2015 - 20:29

    Holy moly, the search is fast. What a fantastic website, loving the design :)

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 21:56

      cheers

  • WB TQM on 02/11/2015 - 20:56
    +3

    You weren't joking about the search speed. It's delicious.
    Well done!

    • thecraw on 02/11/2015 - 21:43
      +1

      Delicious…thats a great term to use.

      • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 21:57

        Maybe I should use that in my marketing.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 21:57
      +1

      :)

  • jdesign on 02/11/2015 - 21:26

    Great Job!

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 21:58
      +1

      thanks

  • malouphix on 02/11/2015 - 21:53

    Does the site support IE 8? :)

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 21:58

      Nope, sorry. I doubt it'd work at all on that 6 year old browser.

      • malouphix on 02/11/2015 - 21:59
        +2

        Thank god!
        Good man. :)

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 02/11/2015 - 22:03
          +2

          lol. I actually only support IE11. I am all for progression of the modern web and will happily lose a bit of traffic to my site to:

          1. Encourage people to upgrade their browsers (I would probably still support them if it wasn't for point 2), and

          2. Not have a whole bunch of legacy code bulking up my website and reducing the quality of experience the rest of us have.

        • malouphix on 02/11/2015 - 22:20

          @jazoom: Very true. Plus allow you to improve the site so much quicker without having to support legacy software.

          Your site really is special. I'm in Brisbane, it's just so damn slick, clean and very, very fast.

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 03/11/2015 - 15:53
          +1

          @malouphix: Thanks for the kind words. I've put in heaps of effort to make it pleasant to use.

  • murkywater on 02/11/2015 - 22:47

    This is great! I've been wanting something for dicksmith with their daily "sales". This is your take on camelx3 I guess?

    Hope you can keep it running without any monetary issues.

    One suggestion: It should show the best price, and the date that best price was seen. Also your charts don't show any date (don't have enough data atm maybe?)

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 03/11/2015 - 16:03

      The charts don't display the bottom bit in Firefox at the moment. That's a bug, sorry.

  • peterpeterpumpkin on 02/11/2015 - 23:49

    The Algolia cloud search employed really does work fast.

    I noticed you hotlink the images from the different stores (I'm not judging since I'm just as guilty and the licensing process can be overwhelming).

    Good luck with your expansion. Like someone else mentioned, it would be good to get some major players to agree to standardised feeds. GS1 might be able to help.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 03/11/2015 - 16:05

      What are you talking about? The whole concept of the world wide web is linking to everyone else's stuff. What you don't want to do is take people's stuff and say it's yours!

      • peterpeterpumpkin on 03/11/2015 - 17:49

        A lot of companies don't like it when you use up the bandwidth of their CDN. Copyright isn't the only grudge. Like I said, I'm not judging and am just as guilty. Just letting you know what can happen from experience (they'll probably contact you if they really care). I'm not sure if you misunderstood what I meant by hotlinking?http://altlab.com/hotlinking.html

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 10/12/2015 - 18:16

          Hi peterpeterpumpkin. Sorry, I just saw your reply now. Thanks for the link. I understand what you are saying. If any of the stores has an issue I'll be happy to work out something with them or remove them from the index. :-)

      • noshopping on 03/11/2015 - 19:58

        Great website. Very impressed, but as peter said, try to work with them because I have a buddy who made a search engine addon (multi-search), it took feeds from Google, Yahoo, etc. They all decided to ban his bots.. People don't ban Google, Google image IPs because it brings them traffic. Alot of these companies may not like what you do (e.g. compare their prices IF they know they are generally more expensive than the competition.. Of course, if your website gets as big as OZBargain, then everyone will want to be indexed because it brings them sales, but until then…

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 03/11/2015 - 20:12
          +1

          I already said if they don't want to be indexed I won't include them. I don't know why you guys keep going on about this.

  • scorpiovegas on 02/11/2015 - 23:56

    Great work!

    Can you add advanced search/filters sometime in the future? i.e:

    • Include these keywords
    • Exclude these keywords
    • Exact phrase match
    • Restrict results by location
    • Restrict by price

    etc…

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 03/11/2015 - 16:07

      Maybe down the line. Thanks for the suggestion!

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 10/12/2015 - 18:18

      Hi scorpiovegas! Big update today with search filters, but all the ones you requested. :) Maybe in the future…

  • chiuy on 03/11/2015 - 04:11

    Very nice! I can see this becoming VERY handy.

    Sure, it's quick, but come on guys… it's working on a tiny handful of vendors.
    I'd be very impressed if you can maintain this kinda speed/responsiveness as your site expands to cover more vendors and products.
    Still, if you can get good coverage of the market, I reckon the potential savings might be worth waiting the few extra seconds for.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 10/12/2015 - 18:20
      +1

      Hi chiuy! 15 stores now and still just as snappy :)

  • Sharp on 03/11/2015 - 10:08

    amazing searching speeds. but needs more vendors.

  • Sergeant Salami on 03/11/2015 - 10:27

    Awesome work mate! Just a suggestion for the price graph. Would it be possible to maybe add a price when you mouseover the graph? Maybe have a small circle follow the mouse/line on the graph and display the price. Also would it be possible to add the lowest price on the product page too?

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 03/11/2015 - 16:08

      I've responded to both of those questions, but this thread has gotten large so I don't expect you to have found it.

      In short: Yes. Probably not useful.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 10/12/2015 - 18:22

      Hi wogboy315. Just released a big update today. Unfortunately graph improvements didn't quite make the cut but they are very high on my to-do list now.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 11/02/2016 - 09:55

      Updating you that the graph now shows specific prices, as you requested!

      • Sergeant Salami on 11/02/2016 - 10:01

        See how much better it looks :) I'm on your site every day! I saw it last week!!! Looks amazing now. Even that header that moves to the top left looks better too.

        • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 11/02/2016 - 10:16

          Yup. And you can now filter and sort search results with more flexibility. :-)

  • Spondoolies84 on 03/11/2015 - 10:38

    Kogan would be good too. I always check ozbargain, ebay, appliances online and kogan in that order when im looking for a new toy to play with.

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 10/12/2015 - 18:22

      15 stores now. Not yet any online-only ones though.

  • Spondoolies84 on 03/11/2015 - 10:46
    +1

    Yeah amazing site mate. Really fluid search happening. Definitely need some additional filtering which im sure is on the roadmap. I come to ozbargain with no idea of what i want and often leave with free moisturizer some rechargeable batteries and sense that i have scored a deal on products which i might one day need. So i think if you had an advanced search function and as part of that you could search for say any technology item that has a % reduction of greater than x % in the last x amount of time. Remember that post a while back of the DSE flash sale and someone created a site which helped index what was the biggest on sale item and everyone loved it? I think that sense of "i dont really have any idea of what i want, i just want something thats heaps cheaper now than it normally is" really sells to people. Especially people reading a forum on a website called OzBARGAIN :)

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 03/11/2015 - 16:10
      +1

      That's exactly what is in the daily emails. ;-)

    • Store Repjazoom @ Price Hipster on 10/12/2015 - 18:23

      Hi OmarTheBoss! Filtered search is now implemented, among other things. :)

  • [Deactivated] on 03/11/2015 - 10:51

    Wholly mother of god its freaking fast.

  • cisco on 03/11/2015 - 11:19

    Good start. I can see the potential. Keep it up.

  • macca on 03/11/2015 - 11:20

    Can I suggest you grab all the store suggestions in this post and repost this as a poll?
    At least that way you can focus your efforts on the most popular stores first as I imagine it's not a quick process to add new stores…

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