I noticed OzBargain.com.au when @adnrw retweetrd a 40% off everything at the Ben Sherman GPO store in Melbourne CBD. Given my distressed Ben Sherman suit jacket has been about the best $320 I ever spent suit jacketwise, I like a fixed % of everything rather than the crap they cant sell. Well if I had money that is. Not that I’m buying at the moment, but it’s made me notice Ozbargain.com.au, and I like the model. Add their social shopping feed’ere.
Consumers register and alert each other to deals, which is perfect as the economics of manually collecting offline prices thru a centralised service sux : And meta price search only works for etailers, not traditional bricks and mortar which is dominant downunder. Being decentralised, realtime, crowd sourced with no content collection costs, I’m grokkn the Ozbargain.com.au model. Gonna check it out more. Twitter integration ala the stocktwits model but for local shopping, makes total sense.
Given the XMAS 08 research from online purchasing habits is that the traditional shopping brands are getting more share of online ecom traffic; With consumers primary use case being research online, buy offline, I hope Ozbargain keep expanding their smart model. Any 1 been using the service, or know more about the biz, pls feel free to add insights in comments.
One Comment
Hi Ben,
I've been running OzBargain since around late 2006. Yes it's built on the model of crowd sourcing. Also with voting aka Digg/Reddit style, but focus on the online/offline bargains available to Australians. I started bargain-blogging around a year prior to that, but people's contribution started flooding in — and OzBargain pretty much evolved from that.