I was recently looking to buy an underwater case for my Fuji Finepix F31fd (which BTW I highly recommend for anyone after a point-n-shoot). As I was going to Hong Kong for work, and having recently purchased a couple of cameras from online shops in HK which was heaps cheaper than buying from local shops I thought I'd try and find my underwater case on a HK site. I wasn't able to find any shop selling it for less than AUD250 which is about the going rate here anyway. From the US I could find it for about AUD180, but with shipping it gets upwards of AUD200.
Whilst in HK Colin took me to the shop behind dcfever.com who had my case selling for HKD1100 (~ AUD170). Ace. But why couldn't I find this online?
I guess the answer has something to do with the site being entirely in Chinese. And shame on me for not knowing my mother tongue. :)
So here comes International Shopping Comparison. A solution to my problem would be to have an aggregator that scrapes local product info & prices in Chinese, but has a UI in English. Of course extending this idea beyond Chinese<->English leads us to the generalised concept of product price aggregation and comparison that would be implemented in any local language feeding a front-end UI that supports multiple end-user languages. For bonus points such a site should take into account what currency the user would like to spend (defaulting to the user's current location), and return prices taking into account current exchange rates as well as postage. Welcome to the Global Economy.
The thing that makes this an entirely solvable problem is that most products have the same product code in many countries if not worldwide. Hence even if the product info, brochures etc may need some translation work a product code and price are pretty easy to do.
If only I spoke more than English!
