There’s so many deal-of-the-day and group deal sites in Australia, it’s not surprising that there’s also been a boom in services which aggregate the deals from those sites on a single page. But which offer the most comprehensive coverage?
Picture by Conrad Bakker
The local bargain market is evolving rapidly – just today, Yahoo!7 announced it was buying Spreets. I’d imagine there’ll be a lot of consolidation over the next year, but in the meantime what is a consumer to do? An aggregation site is one obvious solution.
In the table below, we’ve summarised which existing deal sites are covered by each of the four aggregators we’re aware of:
A tick indicates that the site lists deals from that service.
As you can see from the table, it’s not a particularly even contest. AllTheDeals covers the most sites by far, with DealDump a somewhat distant second. While the whole point of an aggregation site is to make you aware of as many deals as possible, other factors do come into play. Buyii focuses on group deal sites, and in that space its coverage is pretty complete. BargainDesk runs as an Adobe AIR app rather than within your browser. DealDump has a much less crowded design than AllTheDeals, which might be more appealing for quick browsing. AllTheDeals offers both RSS and iPhone options, which makes accessing it on the go simpler.
For all that, there’s part of me that thinks bargain-tracking forums such as OzBargain, Top Bargains and Buckscoop are still preferable in some ways, since their community moderation filters out less interesting deals. Bear in mind too that you’ll still need to sign up on many of the group deal sites to take advantage of offers, and you might find that a particular site matches your tastes so often that you’re less inclined to check alternatives.
What’s your favourite strategy for tracking bargains? Tell us in the comments.
Lifehacker’s weekly Loaded column looks at better ways to manage (and stop worrying about) your money.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.