Be Excellent To Each Other

I thought Google were quite vocal about paid advertising not changing the search results?

I assume paying for the advert itself doesn't change the results, but i'm sure quadrupling the amount of visits must do?
It may have been coincidence, but a week or so of running the google adverts and we jumped from about page 18 to page 1 when searching for cupcakes in milton keynes.

Dunno, really. Doesn't WTB do this for a living?

It's all black magic to me. Current place i'm working paid a fortune to a company to look at our site. Their main recommendation was search engine friendly urls. Worth the cash that was...

Yes, I meant if you have an adwords code that would be very appreciated please.

They're at home - I will hook you up later tonight.

Legendary, thank you.

Visits themselves won't do much, but if those new visitors are putting links to your website in other places as a result of liking what they saw, that would help.

Shit, I've not sent you anything yet, have I? I'm binding it to a vision now, as Derren Brown has taught me to do, and I'll remember tonight.

You're rubbish at this, Matthew.

No, wait... 'Matt'. You've always been a 'Matt'.

Spook!

Nice website Russ. Just a couple of little things which would make it better for me.

Lose the capital B in XBox. Dont know why, just stuck out and annoyed me

I think having the top 10/20 chart (theres plenty of space either side of the main body) for each category would be ace. I dont always know what I want to buy or what is good at the moment, so having this would be useful for people just browsing and not looking specifically.

But yeah, great site.

Maybe allow people to search by site as well (for at least a few) so I can, for example, click xbox games on Amazon, and then sort by price. I know I can do it on amazon, but...

edit: I done broked it.

I have been working for a long time on this (since Bits n Bobs 30), but you can now add items to a PriceWatch list on http://www.finditcheapest.com

Click the Register/Log In link just below the search area to set up your list. You can then add items to your list from all four categories (DVDs, games, CDs and books).

See what you think.

I have literally no idea why this would happen. It worked when Mimi tried it a while ago.
Also I have a custom 404 page you should see instead

Ah - I suspect it was because I had an apostrophe in my password. Or maybe a space. Or a full stop.

Get your sanitize on!

This is on my to do list. I'm going to get a jquery validator to plugin to all the forms to make it more slick, but it's a job for the weekend I think.

Good to know it's not the whole thing that's broken though, yay

jQuery can't sanitize your input data, it can only validate it from the client - it's trivial to get around.

And not properly sanitizing can make your site very vulnerable to L33T EXPLOIT HAXORS.

Or get a forbidden page!

Anyone else registered and got any thoughts?

(Please register)

Sorry. I use Bargain Comparison for all my shopping needs.

I use the superior Find It Cheapestest.

I only use the Internet for port.

Ha! Alcoholic-five, autocorrect!

Lies ! , you use it for cheese and also on the right !

I use the cod-Elizabethan Findest it Cheap.

Okay, some comments, in no particular order:
You need to make the pricewatch register thing more prominent and make it more defined as to what it is so I know why I want to register.
After the registration confirmation, the return page is a bit sparse, only the small links at the top and it took me a short time to notice them.
You need an option to filter out accessories from your lists
You need a "next page" option in your search results
It would be good to sort by (best) price after searching and filtering
You need an "add to watch list" option in the search results - I don't want to have to click every item I want to add to my list.
You need to populate the watch list box with the current price (or ideally with current price -10%), or have it referential. At the moment I can set up a watch to look for a price of £-1, which seems unlikely to occur.
After I have added an item, take me back to my search.

Can you do Kindle books?

I'll try and address your points in turn, thank you for the massive amounts of feedback.
Good point. Not sure what else I can do to make it stand out. Any ideas?
I'll work on the registration confirmation page, cheers.
I've got it on my todo list to add filters to all categories.
Do you mean as well as the pagination links at the bottom? A couple of categories I get told the total number of results, so it's got numbered pagination, and the others do already have next/previous links.
Best price is only available in games unfortunately until I learn how to pull all the results into my own database and show the results from there.
Good idea about the search list, I thought about whether to do this, so I'll add it to the todo list
Another good idea about per filling the price box. It should give you an error if you set -1 though.
Ideally the confirmation will be in a modal popup eventually, so you won't even leave the page.

Thanks for that Bobby, it's really great to know what makes a real difference to people using it, so thank you so much.

The target price boxes on the 'compare prices' pages now have the current lowest price minus 10% pre-filled.

Sorry, forgot to respond:

Maybe just say, " Register to get emails when prices drop" Or some such underneath the main banner

I've got it on my todo list to add filters to all categories.

The pagination options go, first, 1, 2, 3 ,4,5, last. A "next" and "previous" option would make it a little nicer to navigate, altenatively make the number buttons larger.

Good idea about the search list, I thought about whether to do this, so I'll add it to the todo list
Another good idea about per filling the price box. It should give you an error if you set -1 though.
Ideally the confirmation will be in a modal popup eventually, so you won't even leave the page.

Thanks for that Bobby, it's really great to know what makes a real difference to people using it, so thank you so much.[/quote]

Sorry, I am at work and will try and make a bit more sense later.

The pre-load of values doesn't work as it seems to accept integer values only, but populates with ££.pp

Emailing my password in plain text is generally frowned upon.

What browser?

Re: the plaintext password: I am so sorry. That's not my code sadly so I can't even change it.

Hey, don't stress, I entered a dummy password anyway, i was just letting you know. sorry, I could have phrased it a bit nicer!

Browser is Chrome 31.0.1650.57 m

I'll get that, get it tested and fixed as soon as.

Downloaded Chrome, and it was version 31.0.1650.57 m so that's lucky.

Anyway, now fixed, and as a bonus you can even use the little up/down arrows to increment and decrement by pence.
Next up, adding to a PriceWatch list directly from search results.

If I search for 'The Evil Within' for PS3, I really don't expect The Lego Movie to be my number one hit.

If I search for 'Evil Within', it's bottom of the first page of results below all the Resident Evil games and XCOM.

I vary on this depending on my mood.

All searches currently default to show the most popular (ie. best selling) higher up the list. If you change the sort to Best match it will filter closer to what you typed in, but might show older rubbish that isn't necessarily what you were after.

It's a balancing game, and one I might solve by cookies remembering your favourite search type, or expanding teh search options on the front page. I don't know

Couldn't you have the 'best match' as default and order by release date so that you can a match to what you actually typed in (which is what most people are going to expect) but ordered so you don't wade through loads of old stuff?

This is my problem. Different people seem to want different things.

So in your example, if I search for an old film I now have to wade through similarly titled films that were released more recently.

I need to have a look at the site (always), so I'll try and do something clever.

Gotta be best match, reckon.

But with your current setup if it's an old film I'm still going to have to wade through newer stuff with a similar title because you're going to match to anything that's in the search string (including word like 'the') and the newer stuff is likely to rank higher in a 'best selling' sort order.

I'm struggling a bit to see who the current setup will work for given that someone can enter the specific title of something and then get stuff that doesn't match that title. That's surely unintuitive however you slice it?

Also and I'm glad it's been mentioned as I thought I was doing something wrong.

Is it me, or is finditcheapest only using a few websites now? My recent searches have barely returned anything from Amazon, Game, TheHut and sometimes ShopTo. I know the items I've searched for are in stock on these sites so what gives?

Not changed anything on the back end. God knows.

Not really had a chance to look at it recently with new job and wedding and generally life.

I'll take a look though.

Hi Russ, me again. I added a game to my price watch list a week or so ago and I've just been on the site and it seems that it hadn't updated as the price of the game is now lower than my target.

I had to manually update it and it didn't send me an email. Just thought I'd best tell you in case anyone else has the problem.