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.
Not sure if that is a problem with Amazons search or the product listings themselves. Last time I was looking for a motherboard on Amazon it seemed as if half couldn't decide whether they had an AMD or Intel CPU socket. The descriptions, technical details and serial numbers where all over the place. Apparently the process of putting up thousands of products on Amazon is fairly automated and there are exactly zero humans checking if the result makes any sense.
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...
Well, I am "outside of Germany" and I know the site since at least 15 years. May I remind you that europe consists of more countries then just Germany?
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.
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).
That's interesting and you're right. Never happend upon this behavior until now.
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...
Haha, actually the reason I noticed was because I was shopping for RAM at the beginning of this year. The product above was just my first random thought, it seems to be very regular there.
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.
I have experienced this a large number of times, that when coming from geizhals or from a few other price comparison sites I got a better price, some times even close to 10%, on various online shops for computer components.
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.
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.
my secret tip is schottenland.de respectively hardwareschotte.de they’re on the market for a long time as well, they do have many many filters. kind of an underdog with much expertise.
From their job offers page for a sysadmin/devops position:
> 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...
Seems based in Austria (surprised to see it here, I thought it was local only).
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.
It's an Austrian law thing. They have to list a salary so essentially all job offers show the legal Kollektivvertrag minimum salary which is obviously way too little. They then add "es besteht die Bereitschaft zur Überzahlung" saying they're willing to pay more than that.
So essentially just ignore the salaries in Austrian job offers.
Any number mentioned is going to be wrong. It heavily depends on the area the business is operating in, the size of the company, the work you have to do and the location you are based (Vienna/city vs country side).
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.
We had great wuzzler culture there (with a former semi-pro on the tech team back then), which eventually prompted me to ask them to introduce that "requirement"/nice-to-have to the job ads. Nice to see they still list 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.
Geizhals is much older, was mostly focused on IT/electronics for many years and is thus strongest in these categories. Idealo is broader (due to its much larger team/company) but sometimes lacking detail where Geizhals is good, and vice-versa. Geizhals also covers the Austrian market better while Idealo is stronger in Germany.
Finally a website where i can filter for criteria I need, down to stuff like keyboard without number block, with Trackpoint (on the site it's called pointing stick). No other site i know does this, not even the vendors themselves.
pricewatch.com was the original inspiration for this website and pricegrabber.com was (apparently until some years ago) a close equivalent for many years.
For what is worth, when I got my 3070 earlier this year this gpu-specific site[0] was even more helpful than geizhals as they'd only list a couple at a time at okay prices and this seemed to update quicker.
Checking it now there are no 3080s actually avaible.
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.
Restyling does not improve the site in most cases. This UI is functional and works. Also, it gets way less on my nerves than the uniform flat style glitzy nonsense.
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.
How is it not HN worthy? A review of the comments indicates some love and appreciation for a company apparently doing many things right. The implication brings contrast to Amazon and others. It's a case study. I think it's exactly what belongs here.
I use them for tech parts but hadn't even occured to me to check for things like that there. Ironically your comment asking how this is HN-worthy is what's making this submission useful for me.
Geizhals had a rough stance in Germany. Despite being very early on the market, it used the .at TLD (and later geizhals.cc and geizhals.net) because it was impossible to acquire the .de domain. It was later bought by a competitor who turned his deals website into a price comparison (geizkragen.de), which caused much confusion among german users. Eventually, Geizhals bought the domain (along with the .com, which it had gone to WIPO over and lost - https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2005/d200... ), for a (AFAIK) record-setting 7-figure price for a .de domain. Said competitor went on to build bitcoin.de and was very successful with it.
Could be. As far as i can tell they do not market themselves, word of mouth only work so far within their (German?) tech savvy audience. I was a student in Germany since 2003 and use Geizhals extensively for purchasing stuff, especially computer related stuff. Other price comparison engines like Idealo, Kelkoo etc. suck in compare to Geizhals.
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.