Bargains website: Bikehound.co.uk

Wrath Rob

Saw this on road.cc, a bargain hunting website called Bikehound.co.uk. Essentially its an aggregation service pulling together bargains from other retailers into a single place. I've had a quick look and there's some decent stuff on there.

What's the best bargain you can find?

Gizmo_

Hmmm. I was thinking of starting just such a website myself. Curses.

DrLex

Has it been revamped, then?
Saw ads for it on STW a few weeks back and had a look; was pretty lacklustre. Will it be a good alternative to the bike bargain thread here, I wonder.

il_principe

It's not very good. Just ran a search for a craft sleeveless base layer. It came up with Wiggle as the cheapest at £22.50. PBK have 'em for £18...

Mr Will

How exactly is this different to what Google does for every product in existence already?

YIMan

Google doesn't do it for every product in existence unless you are very clever at searching, in my experience. Google shopping only seems to bring up certain (sponsored?) stores and it can be a pain trawling through search results trying to find actual online shop prices.

charles-bh

Hello chaps, thanks for the feedback. good bad or indifferent it's always useful to hear.
I'll check the craft sleeveless issue, PBK are definitely in there so I need to work out why they aren't showing up as the cheapest.

Any other anomalies, suggestions, even flaming, anything really, just give us a shout.

Cheers
Charles from Bikehound.

pastryboy

Could be good in time.

Seems to link to discontinued items though for example Mavic XM719 at evans and 2006 Mavic Aksium wheels on CRC are two I just clicked on.

Presumably the latter, being from 2006, hasn't been available for a fair while.

dhope

CRC annoyingly seem to keep discontinued and out of stock stuff on the site for ages though, if only so they can be discounted by 90% just to look good.

charles-bh

Yeah I've noticed some of the stores have got some amazingly old stock that I guess they find at the back of the warehouse and stick online for peanuts. There were some Kona frames from about 6 years ago that were a real steal. I think they probably only have one of the item though and obviously they go pretty quickly. Watching the stats today on launch day I've realised I need to get the store updates done way more frequently than I originally thought. It's been a steep learning curve!

(and yes, its the same site you saw us testing on STW a while back, threw up a prototype, realised it had potential to help people on a tight budget out, but also realised I needed a kick up the a*** production wise! )

rubertoe

charles-bh wrote:

Yeah I've noticed some of the stores have got some amazingly old stock that I guess they find at the back of the warehouse and stick online for peanuts. There were some Kona frames from about 6 years ago that were a real steal. I think they probably only have one of the item though and obviously they go pretty quickly. Watching the stats today on launch day I've realised I need to get the store updates done way more frequently than I originally thought. It's been a steep learning curve!

(and yes, its the same site you saw us testing on STW a while back, threw up a prototype, realised it had potential to help people on a tight budget out, but also realised I needed a kick up the a*** production wise! )

If its suggestions, Feedback and critique you want you have come to the right place.

charles-bh

rubertoe wrote:

If its suggestions, Feedback and critique you want you have come to the right place.

haha for sure man for sure! That's why I'm here to listen to the great and the good!!

Tricycleboy

would love a "sort by price lowest to highest" etc function. Its a pain trawling through 5 pages of leg warmers that don't start with cheapest first- its about bargains after all.

otherwise- thanks for this, i get seriously bored trawling google for the best price!

The Rookie

Just tried searching for 5 different things I'm looking for, on every one '0 Bargains Found' - I know they are out there!

Example - looking at getting a Hope IBR (Integrated Bash Ring) for my MTB.

Wrath Rob

Apparently retailers have to ask to be added, rather than it automatically finding sites and indexing them.

davmaggs

The flaw in the online aggregation services is that the online retailers seem to game them, and some retailers do it blatantly. Tricks include giving prices for items that aren't in stock and won't ever be just so people will visit the site (yes, you Probike), discounts off mythical RRP, excluding postage or worse of all not actually selling the item at all (but list a review or some such hidden text) which is enough to flag in the search engine, but actually brings the user to a page about other items.

I suppose what I'm asking for is for a new service to give some kind of weighting to it's search results which account for know tricksters. That could be automated or via user feedback.

tc345

It looks like a pretty good service that saves trawling through sites myself. An option to list by price as well as discount would be a great addition. Otherwise i guess just make sure that the stock from as many sites as possible is on there!

daxplusplus

YIMan wrote:

Google doesn't do it for every product in existence unless you are very clever at searching, in my experience. Google shopping only seems to bring up certain (sponsored?) stores and it can be a pain trawling through search results trying to find actual online shop prices.

Google Shopping http://www.google.co.uk/shopping is supplied by direct feeds from the various retailers websites. If a website doesn't provide the feed to Google then Google Shopping doesnt know about it. It's nothing to do with sponsorship (although I'm sure a lot of retailers that do pay for ads on Google will also supply Google Shopping with an appropriate feed too. They may even be able to get it moved up the lists but I don't think so.)

michaelappleton

Bookmarked, thanks Wrath Rob.

As for the my best bargain watch this space.

daniel_b

I used to use this one: http://www.bikepimp.co.uk/

Not for ages though, not sure why, perhaps it was not any good!

meanredspider

I guess we've got used to good search engines but a search on "Assos Ladies Tights" (minimum terms) produced zero results despite there being plenty of ladies tights if I search on just "Assos" - presumably because the items are "Assos Lady Tights". Given the nature of the site, I'd have thought a few terms (such as Ladies, Ladies', Lady, Lady's, female, women's etc) need to be broadly interchangeable.

To my mind, these sites are only valuable if:

1. You can find what you are looking for (the quality of the search engine)

2. The low(est) prices are reliable and accurate

SteppenHerring

meanredspider wrote:

I guess we've got used to good search engines but a search on "Assos Ladies Tights" (minimum terms) produced zero results despite there being plenty of ladies tights if I search on just "Assos" - presumably because the items are "Assos Lady Tights". Given the nature of the site, I'd have thought a few terms (such as Ladies, Ladies', Lady, Lady's, female, women's etc) need to be broadly interchangeable.

To my mind, these sites are only valuable if:

1. You can find what you are looking for (the quality of the search engine)

2. The low(est) prices are reliable and accurate

Er, "ladies" is the plural of "lady". If you are referring to tights belonging to a lady, then it's "lady's".

meanredspider

SteppenHerring wrote:

meanredspider wrote:

I guess we've got used to good search engines but a search on "Assos Ladies Tights" (minimum terms) produced zero results despite there being plenty of ladies tights if I search on just "Assos" - presumably because the items are "Assos Lady Tights". Given the nature of the site, I'd have thought a few terms (such as Ladies, Ladies', Lady, Lady's, female, women's etc) need to be broadly interchangeable.

To my mind, these sites are only valuable if:

1. You can find what you are looking for (the quality of the search engine)

2. The low(est) prices are reliable and accurate

Er, "ladies" is the plural of "lady". If you are referring to tights belonging to a lady, then it's "lady's".

Yup - I passed English O'level :roll: - you might have spotted the various options at the end of my post suggesting that I might understand the difference. As it happens, Assos's (see what I did there? ), title for the tights is "Lady Tights" (the possessive is nowhere to be seen). My point isn't one of grammar, though, it's one of search engines. In fact, if you do a search in Google on "Assos Ladies Tights" you get "Lady" "Womens"[sic] "Ladies". Do the same search in Google using "Assos Lady's Tights" you don't get a single result using the term "Lady's" on the first page. I do have some idea of what I'm doing....

SteppenHerring

Sorry MRS. Couldn't resist.

I haven't looked at the site yet. I guess there's a few things to be ironed out. In the meantime, I shall blame Marco.

charles-bh

Thanks chaps, just an update regarding the suggestions you made - We've got the search function improved and moved it to a quicker server so it's much more useable under the mass of traffic we are getting.
It was also interesting seeing how people use the site and the types of searches people were putting in - we've greatly enhanced the amount of products featured and put in a sort by lowest price feature so it can be used for price comparison as well as bargain browsing.

It's been a lot of fun putting it together - I'm loving being able to search an absolutely huge amount of bike data and find the real gems that are out there.

Any more feedback feel free to share - if there's something you think will be useful I'll have a look at getting it featured on bikehound!

DrLex

charles-bh wrote:

[...]

Any more feedback feel free to share - if there's something you think will be useful I'll have a look at getting it featured on bikehound!

Attractive girls in your ads on singletrackworld, but neither bikes nor hounds. Guess it's just the old tenet of "sex sells", but a bit hackneyed.

meanredspider

So I tried the Assos Lady Tights search again - 202 results - seemingly everything with Assos in the title and not sorted by relevance. The only pair of Assos Lady Tights on the first 5 pages of results were from Wiggle and only in XL

TBH - it would need to get much much better to retain my interest