I always go there not only when I need a cheap vendor, but especially when I don't know exactly what exists on the market because they have such a superior index and filter for finding the product you search for.
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.
I use a local equivalent (Tweakers Pricewatch). I've been using this since what feels like the late 90ies, and like you, I never quite saw the appeal of Amazon. I've been buying online since the 90ies, and that experience is still the same. Amazon, or any other 'marketplace', has not improved on that. Their selection is of course wider, but it's just unpleasant and a huge time sink every time. But even that a local competitor (bol.com) does better.
Any vendors who start selling Chinese stuff, is part of deal to not allow excluding items from search results?
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.
> 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.
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.
I usually do that as well. But sometimes the properties of a product are not maintained correctly and you might miss out on certain manufacturers completely. Last time this happened to me was when looking for a new TV. Sony was completely filtered out although some of their TVs had all the features i was looking for.
TLDR: The (wrong) filter settings might make you blind for the whole range of the market.
One of their most impressive features is how many product attributes they track and allow you to filter for.
E.g. for mainboards you can filter for support for all generations of Ryzen CPU + at least M.2 slots + BIOS flashback (allows you to do BIOS updates without a CPU or RAM) + at least one USB-C + built in IO shield + at least 12 VRM phases + WiFi 6 + in stock: https://geizhals.eu/?cat=mbam4&v=k&hloc=at&hloc=de&hloc=pl&h...
This is something that drives me nuts about Amazon, who are a giant that has the resources to do it properly - but don't. Their filters are usually useless, filtering out matching production, and including products that don't even match from their title.
In Russia, there is Yandex Market, they have almost the same, if not better granularity, and they don't use any scraping to generate product data — all human filled
Geizhals is basically the opposite of modern advertising: Provides a very useful service to the customer but only costs the advertising party something for successful conversions. And it basically does not need any tracking beyond the outbound links associating a transaction with them.
Funny that this is trending for the first time on HN after all these years.
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.
The website respects DNT and informs the user with a small popup that disappears automatically. What a joy! The web could be such a nice place if it was like this everywhere.
Hehe, this sites exists since, well, a loooong time. I typically use it as a directory, to know whats available in a certain category. But I really wonder how this site made it onto the frontpage. This is a bit like posting "amazon.com" :-)
I guess it's popular because people outside of Germany didn't know there is a better product search than amazon.com. And if we honestly compare the two, Geizhals beats Amazon in almost every regard, from better filters to less tracking...
Yeah, main office is in Vienna and they are the major Perl employers in this area. Perl, all the way down. Also the CTO was the first one who brought webperformance (meetups) into our community 10+ years ago.
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.
I really like Geizhals. It provides a way better UX than Amazon for browsing computer hardware and other electronics.
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.
A very good (and proven/old) price comparison tracker from before Web 2.0. I find it a bit cumbersome to figure shops who deliver to my country (NL) but if you're in German-speaking Europe this is AFAIK (still) the go-to. In The Netherlands, we got Tweakers Pricewatch.
This and Idealo are what I use to track prices for products I don't need urgently, like harddrives, to get notified when the overall market price drops or a sale goes live
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
It works pretty well from my experience, however the following caveats apply:
- 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..
Wow, I didn't know this site still existed! I seem to remember that ~15 years ago it regularly showed up in Google search results but it doesn't anymore. I'm wondering what happened – did they stop spending a ton of money on Adwords?
The .eu domain was never really pushed, it's been using NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW for many years to avoid duplicated content penalties from Google and double crawling. The .at/.de domains should still be very visible in Google, at least they were a few years ago when I checked regularly (I use Duckduckgo exclusively).
A really wonderful site, great filters, great price tracking. The only thing I'd wish for would be the ability to exclude all those amazon.com shops from the results (everyone from amazons marketplace seems to be listed as a distinct shop there).
I agree, they are fantastic and i've used them for the last 16 years or so. Their product database is unmatched and many of my suggestions have been kindly accepted and implemented.
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.
https://www.camelcamelcamel.com works really well against Amazon products. There is also a 3rd-party tracking component, but it seems to mainly focus on Amazon prices.
I’ve been using this for years and it’s been extremely useful. The feature to plot the prices over time is great to gauge whether it’s a good time to buy something or if you’d rather wait.
Build quite a few computers in the past based on their useful wishlist feature.
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.
[+] [-] mqus|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sdze|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brnt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smusamashah|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Abishek_Muthian|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ganomi|4 years ago|reply
TLDR: The (wrong) filter settings might make you blind for the whole range of the market.
[+] [-] 66fm472tjy7|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GordonS|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] n1000|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zmix|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baybal2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ysleepy|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] formerly_proven|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyjones|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jahnu|4 years ago|reply
Still one of the best sites on the internet. Kudos!
[+] [-] schleck8|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eulenteufel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlang23|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fxtentacle|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marban|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] franze|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oezi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moepstar|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] purerandomness|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aerroon|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vmp|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Fnoord|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arendtio|4 years ago|reply
Do you know of any similar pages, maybe for the US or other countries?
[+] [-] bjornsing|4 years ago|reply
1. https://prisjakt.nu https://prisjakt.no https://pricespy.co.uk etc
[+] [-] esel2k|4 years ago|reply
Edited: Url to be clickable
[+] [-] TicklishTiger|4 years ago|reply
But I think it has the focus more on the user interface than on a broad product index.
[1] https://www.productchart.com
[+] [-] schleck8|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schleck8|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] moepstar|4 years ago|reply
- 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..
[+] [-] codethief|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyjones|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bildung|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tepix|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jh00ker|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k__|4 years ago|reply
Usually they list the best offers, and if not it's at least a good starting point.
[+] [-] HippoBaro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deltron3030|4 years ago|reply
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.