Geizhals – Tech Product Price Comparison and Tracking
geizhals.eu
geizhals.eu
Especially Amazon is exceptionally bad, Even if I sort by price it isn't guaranteed they really show them in order and even if they do, the filters/search terms are often so broad that sorting from cheap to expensive just shows 100 pages of crap first.
Idealo is somewhat fine in terms of capabilities but I think the geizhals UI is far superior.
TLDR: The (wrong) filter settings might make you blind for the whole range of the market.
In any case, it does not take much to be leagues better than Amazon, which gets you a usually nothing more than a price and color filter.
Amazon do not have any options to excludes items that ship from China. https://daraz.pk, largest online shopping store in Pakistan bought by AliBaba recently, has done the same. There is only one checkbox named China to show only Chinese items but there is absolutely no way to exclude items shipping from China.
Because Amazon shows what 'it wants to sell to us' (even 'Recommended' varies with users) and not what 'we need'. They have enough data to guess what we need, but they use it to sell what they want with enough gimmicks(What others bought, Fake ratings/reviews etc.) to make the average person think that's what they need.
You know there is a lot of optimization in the background for all the faceting and search, I'd be really interested how they implemented that.
A lot of the value also comes from meticulously integrating shop product datasets either by scraping or cooperating, combining offers etc.
Disruptive by putting in the hard work and keeping at it.
FWIW, I was the original founder and developer. This started as a Perl script crawling 8 local merchants' price lists and writing a single HTML file (some time in 1997), then turned into a CGI script reading flat text files (i.e. no database), then into a mod_perl handler. No complete rewrites at least until 2014 when I left the company. Perl got really unwieldy at some point, would not recommend (and my code was universally hated I guess).
By the way, geizhals.at (the original domain) was in the top 2000 Alexa websites for a few years (somewhere around the years 2000-2004) AFAIR despite being from a very small country.
Still one of the best sites on the internet. Kudos!
From what i figured in the past, they want you to believe that is the case as they earn their affiliate commission from you clicking through - however, years of ordering hardware especially avoiding to click and going the "extra mile" of going manually to the respective website and searching for the product there yielded exactly the same price as advertised on Geizhals.
https://www.csv-direct.de/artinfo.php?artnr=AGX1428619&KATEG... (758,93€)
then look at the geizhals price:
https://geizhals.de/ubiquiti-unifiswitch-enterprise-24-rackm... (748,09€)
After you have visited the page from geizhals, the lower price will stay even on direct links, for that product only (until you clear local data/cookies).
Incidentally, i've bought RAM from CSV-direct sometime last year, after getting an alert from Geizhals... not sure if i clicked through with the link from the email, the price however did match...
FWIW, it's enough to just set the parameter &pva=geizhals2 in the GET request for the product page once. Could be fun to see how regular it is.
For example a shop where I have seen this almost always was jacob.de.
However, I have not bought many computer parts during the last year, so I do not know if this still happens today.
A couple of years ago, it was certainly very frequent.
My only gripe with it is how many stores only sell to Germany, Austria and Switzerland. I know that it's not geizhals' fault. Because of this, it's mostly an improved way to search Amazon for me.
It's a bit funny that if I were in a richer country, where people are paid more, the price of commuter hardware would be cheaper.
It really helped me make some decent budget builds.
Tried to publish it to the chrome extension store as well but they removed it. Honestly just use Firefox, google is garbage.
Do you know of any similar pages, maybe for the US or other countries?
But I think it has the focus more on the user interface than on a broad product index.
1. https://prisjakt.nu https://prisjakt.no https://pricespy.co.uk etc
Edited: Url to be clickable
what i find really interesting is the 'search subscription' where you can filter products to your liking and then track the search as a whole. i only discovered that today so we'll see how it goes. the filters worked well for sure
- maximum reminder period is 6 months
- if your price target is not met, no reminder
- no, not even if your reminder period is up - no reminder to prolong
- i'd say about 30-50% of the time, if you happen to read the mail hours later, the price is already up again
Aside from potentially getting good deals it also saves one from impulse buys and sometimes i even got a surprise reminder i completely forgot setting..
The only feature that's missing is a toggle that will show you all their products in the product database including those with no offers. Right now you will only find them when you search for their names but you can't list all 5k (5120x2880) monitors for example, only the very few models that are still being sold today.
Usually they list the best offers, and if not it's at least a good starting point.
You can aggregate the parts you need and then find the best offers for all parts within a single shipment, or shipments from different sellers when something is unavailable or cheaper elsewhere.
Not sure about the UX though, it's nice to use if you more or less know what you want and need, to find the cheapest thing within a category or based on required specs and features.
> Angaben gemäß GlBG: Das KV-Mindestgrundgehalt für diese Position beträgt € 3,501 brutto monatlich (IT-Kollektivvertrag 2021, ST1 Erfahrungsstufe, Vollzeit = 38,5h), es besteht die Bereitschaft zur Überzahlung.
Seems they are even more stingy than their customers...
Minimum salary as per collective agreement must be displayed on the job listing, but for skilled workers it's a mere reference. I asked 40% more than what was advertised for my current job and got it.
There's 3 different popular table "systems" I have seen: Garlando, Leonhart and Tornado.
In Austria, Garlando is used almost exclusively (except active competitive players who need to know all of them), therefore Austrians aren't as good at Tornado/Leonhart typically.
So essentially just ignore the salaries in Austrian job offers.
Vienna is very competitive so salery can exceed KV quite a bit. Even for entry positions. On the country side it will depend but usually not much more. But costs of living (especially housing) are also lower.
To my knowledge this is how it is done at geizhals, idealo and even google.
Both have changed dramatically though.
Where are people buying RTX 3080 graphics cards these days? All the prices I see (USA) are either 2500+ or out of stock.
Checking it now there are no 3080s actually avaible.
For instance searching for RAM, mainboard, etc., then going to the site of the product just to discover there is already a new,
(supposedly) better edition available, but nobody is stocking that, or willing to do so.
Depending on your view it gives a distorted view of what is available, compared to what could be available.
Imagine they'd get their list directly from the OEMs, and show how lagging the merchants are.
Like a visualization of the supply-chain, the capacity of the channel, and how lagging and incomplete the merchants are.
Like a diff-view between what is available at the source, how it moves into the channel(s), an when it is available for you (if at all!)
I guess it depends on what is being tested by the countless hardware review sites, and what's known to the people.
Whereas I, scroogy as usual, from time to time have to source several dozen to about a hundred low-end systems,
and prefer to get stuff from the "also runs" like
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitegroup_Computer_Systems […] https://www.ecs.com.tw/en
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biostar […] https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilk_Elektronik […] https://www.goodram.com/en/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcend_Information […] https://transcend-info.com/
to run some form of Linux or BSD on it, for light office or remote desktop use.
Ghastly BIOS? Doesn't matter, is only used once during initial setup, and then after updates, if necessary.
No gaming Bling-Bling? Matters even less, since it has no useful function and is disabled, if it's there at all.
Bad VRMs or cooling of these? Does it matter when I don't overclock?
I'm doing this since about 15 years this way, and had no stress with this choices, at all.
All I did was checking the installation manual pdf of the mainboard for fan connectors, and choose them accordingly.
I'm too old-fashioned, I guess?
Anyway, enough of a rant.
Geizhals is the best we have, but it could be much better!
And thumbs-up for no-frills look&feel without dumbing it down!
Our beta just opened so feel free to check it out :)
[We also just applied to YC W22 so fingers crossed!]
going to www.chestr.app doesn't work, only chestr.app does
At its base, geizhals is a database where much effort went into data quality. Chestr seems(to me) to be another social media site but focused on shopping.
Simple comparison (from the demo video): GH/Chestr Comparing prices:yes/no Filtering/sorting for a multitude of attributes:yes/no Social component:no(at most a rating/review)/yes Needs an account:no/yes Focusing on information over feelings:yes/no manually maintained entries:yes(at least I assume so, no one comes close)/no Getting a handle on everything that exists for a type of product:yes/no Inclusion of past prices:yes/no
To me, chestr is basically worthless. I don't care what others bought when I'm searching for something. What fits for them doesn't have to fit for me. I'm not starting from a specific shopping site but from the products itself, and then search for the perfect (price, reviews) shopping site.
For that matter, this seems like a great site for influencers and their audience. I very much doubt that the data quality required for building something like geizhals can be achieved in a "hack it together" startup context.
chess24.com is another example. A traditional UI that appears quirky in the beginning but is superior once you get used to it.
Many restylings replace something individual and special with bland uniformity. Just Like TV makeover shows.
It seems to please the interest of the HN crowd, which is conform to HN guidelines.
The interesting question for me is, why does it please it...
2. You can sort the geizhals results by user ratings and it also displays review scores on the desktop version/mobile details page
3. Kakaku was established a year after Geizhals, according to their wiki entries and domain registry