I scraped the prices for 17k+ audio plugins so you can see price history and setup price alerts on products

[musicsoftwaredeals]

Then my follow-up question would be; how are you guys/girls paying for the time and work to maintain this since the service is free to us? Or will there be advertising deals with vendors later down the line?

Affiliate links for now. Once we've built up enough traffic at a later point, we may offer some very unintrusive banner ads possibly, but only if they can be done unintrusively and make them relevant to customers (ie. music software related)

[Double Tap]

I was looking yesterday at how Blackhole prices have changed and MSD was really useful. Things have really come on.

All four of your ideas for next steps sound useful, although perhaps some retailers might object to the coupons idea.

Things I noticed:

- the rectangular icons for the different shops were hard to read when looking at the graph of prices over time. These are the ones you select/deselect to show the different lines. Actually I can see that’s one of the things you’ve changed. Bestservice is still hard to see on the dark background.

- some products still need tidying up eg ProjectSAM’s Lumina is differently named at JRR Shop v Bestservice v Pluginfox

Thanks for the feedback. Yes you're right actually Best Service is a little hard to see on the dark background so we'll update that thanks!

Thanks for the feedback regarding the ProjectSAM products. We're still manually working our way through some of the data and "merging" some products that are the same (some retailers call them different things so we have to merge the names) and tagging them. You should find ProjectSAM is all done now:

https://musicsoftwaredeals.com/?jsf=jet ... projectsam

Nice one. I'm just having another look at the site now and these things spring to mind from my user experience:

On product pages:

Some of the other shop names are also quite hard to read due to colour issues - Pluginboutique, Pluginfox, the FX Chain

Is there a way to pull a product description from somewhere and give us a couple of lines, like Google's two line extract in search results?

On search results pages:

It would be nice to be able to save filters so I can set things like manufacturers I'm interested in or those I don't want to hear from.

Would be nice to be able to sort by manufacturer.

Could you have a 'freebies' tab next to Deals under $5? There are quite a few $0 products.

I like the 'Lowest Price' banner which I can see on some AAS products. Could you fit a 'lowest price in the last 12 months' figure on the product search results panel somewhere?

Bug: Currently the product icon 'Not on Sale' or the level of discount eg '92%' doesn't seem to be working correctly eg SSL Drumstrip is showing 'Not on Sale' but is showing up (seems to be correctly placed in order of discount) with the price at Audiodeluxe of $19 v list price of $199.

I wonder if this is because sometimes deals are almost not really deals because the products are effectively permanently discounted, or perhaps products aren't necessarily flagged in a store as being on sale because they're kind of at their 'normal' price. The problem with filtering by total discount is that you get something like Rift Lite by Minimal Audio which has a nominal price of $29 but is effectively free as an intro to Rift - the price is there to create a perceived value for the plugin. So really it's just clutter - except you can't really account for that easily. Perhaps you could include a stat somewhere on how many days in a year that a product is available at a discount. What I'd like to be able to do is sort by 'best' discount ie how close is the current discounted price to the lowest ever price, and what is the difference if not? That would be a closer way of getting at a 'true' value for products which are frequently discounted.

Anyway, that's plenty for now.

[musicsoftwaredeals]

Quick update:

- (Re) Added the "Show Expired Deals" selection box so you can only show products on sale or show all products
- Added sorting by "Discount" - highest to lowest / lowest to highest
- Added sorting for "Newest deals to oldest deals" and "Oldest Deals to Newest Deals"
- Added "Random" sorting which is the default
- Improved mobile responsiveness
- Click product image tile will bring you to the price history page

More updates coming soon thanks

[musicsoftwaredeals]

I was looking yesterday at how Blackhole prices have changed and MSD was really useful. Things have really come on.

All four of your ideas for next steps sound useful, although perhaps some retailers might object to the coupons idea.

Things I noticed:

- the rectangular icons for the different shops were hard to read when looking at the graph of prices over time. These are the ones you select/deselect to show the different lines. Actually I can see that’s one of the things you’ve changed. Bestservice is still hard to see on the dark background.

- some products still need tidying up eg ProjectSAM’s Lumina is differently named at JRR Shop v Bestservice v Pluginfox

Thanks for the feedback. Yes you're right actually Best Service is a little hard to see on the dark background so we'll update that thanks!

Thanks for the feedback regarding the ProjectSAM products. We're still manually working our way through some of the data and "merging" some products that are the same (some retailers call them different things so we have to merge the names) and tagging them. You should find ProjectSAM is all done now:

https://musicsoftwaredeals.com/?jsf=jet ... projectsam

Nice one. I'm just having another look at the site now and these things spring to mind from my user experience:

On product pages:

Some of the other shop names are also quite hard to read due to colour issues - Pluginboutique, Pluginfox, the FX Chain

Is there a way to pull a product description from somewhere and give us a couple of lines, like Google's two line extract in search results?

On search results pages:

It would be nice to be able to save filters so I can set things like manufacturers I'm interested in or those I don't want to hear from.

Would be nice to be able to sort by manufacturer.

Could you have a 'freebies' tab next to Deals under $5? There are quite a few $0 products.

I like the 'Lowest Price' banner which I can see on some AAS products. Could you fit a 'lowest price in the last 12 months' figure on the product search results panel somewhere?

Bug: Currently the product icon 'Not on Sale' or the level of discount eg '92%' doesn't seem to be working correctly eg SSL Drumstrip is showing 'Not on Sale' but is showing up (seems to be correctly placed in order of discount) with the price at Audiodeluxe of $19 v list price of $199.

I wonder if this is because sometimes deals are almost not really deals because the products are effectively permanently discounted, or perhaps products aren't necessarily flagged in a store as being on sale because they're kind of at their 'normal' price. The problem with filtering by total discount is that you get something like Rift Lite by Minimal Audio which has a nominal price of $29 but is effectively free as an intro to Rift - the price is there to create a perceived value for the plugin. So really it's just clutter - except you can't really account for that easily. Perhaps you could include a stat somewhere on how many days in a year that a product is available at a discount. What I'd like to be able to do is sort by 'best' discount ie how close is the current discounted price to the lowest ever price, and what is the difference if not? That would be a closer way of getting at a 'true' value for products which are frequently discounted.

Anyway, that's plenty for now.

Thanks very much for this feedback its incredibly useful! To answer your questions:

1. Yes we'll improve the colours for the store
2. Yes we need to add some product description for SEO purposes too so will eventually do that
3. For search results, you can save any filter via the URL. For example if you untick particular manufacturers, set price limits, you'll see the URL updates with the new criteria. Then you just save that URL and when you go back to it, it will update with the new results.
4. You can "sort" by manufacturer if you click on the "More Options" section and then select the manufacturers you want to see there
5. We could do freebies but there are not many overall. For example here are the products $0-$1 and there's only 1 of them that are free currently
6. Can you explain what you mean by fitting the lowest price in the last 12 months on the product results. Do you mean if a product is on sale, but not hit its lowest price in the past 12 months, then show the lowest price it has hit in the past 12 months on that product tile?
7. The "Not On Sale" bug you mentioned is just actually something we need to make clearer. That product is not on sale currently but the last price was $19 on sale. So we're going to improve how we show that so it won't cross out the full price, but instead will just show full price and "Last sale price" as the sale figure.

Love to hear any other feedback you have!

[musicsoftwaredeals]

We've made two small changes:

1. Previously the manufacturer page (eg. Project SAM) would not show any listing if there was no deals. We've updated it now so that you can toggle "Show Expired Deals" or "Don't Show Expired Deals" making it easier to just visit a particular manufacturer page and see only their deals

2. We've added all of the brands that we have data on to the "Manufacturers" dropdown menu. It previously only showed the companies that were on sale (300+) but now shows all companies (600+)

More updates shortly!

[musicsoftwaredeals]

Some more quick updates:

- Moved the "manufacturer" and "store" dropdowns around so the manufacturer dropdown is in the main section you see. Some users said they wanted to sort by manufacturer more than just select stores

- Added a slider for discount % so you can only show products on discount between X and X price

- We've improved how we show products that were on sale previously. Now when it shows as product is not on sale, it will show the normal price, "Not on Sale" and "Last sale price"

- Added notice about affiliate links to the website

[Double Tap]

Thanks very much for this feedback its incredibly useful! To answer your questions:

1. Yes we'll improve the colours for the store
2. Yes we need to add some product description for SEO purposes too so will eventually do that
3. For search results, you can save any filter via the URL. For example if you untick particular manufacturers, set price limits, you'll see the URL updates with the new criteria. Then you just save that URL and when you go back to it, it will update with the new results.
4. You can "sort" by manufacturer if you click on the "More Options" section and then select the manufacturers you want to see there
5. We could do freebies but there are not many overall. For example here are the products $0-$1 and there's only 1 of them that are free currently
6. Can you explain what you mean by fitting the lowest price in the last 12 months on the product results. Do you mean if a product is on sale, but not hit its lowest price in the past 12 months, then show the lowest price it has hit in the past 12 months on that product tile?
7. The "Not On Sale" bug you mentioned is just actually something we need to make clearer. That product is not on sale currently but the last price was $19 on sale. So we're going to improve how we show that so it won't cross out the full price, but instead will just show full price and "Last sale price" as the sale figure.

Love to hear any other feedback you have!

Yes, sorry, forgot to reply to this. I didn’t say it very well - what I mean is adding the Lowest Price figure from the product page to the product tiles in the search results.

If I search for Sound Particles 6FX bundle then I can see the current best price is $480 and the last five sale prices but can’t see that it has been at $233.78 in October this year until I go to the product page.

Seeing those two figures side by side is interesting information and it would be nice to see it in search results too if it doesn’t add too much clutter.

The reason I mentioned “lowest price in the last 12 months” was that it wouldn’t be useful to know that, say, PluginName was discounted from $100 to $25 in 2018 if since then it’s never been lower than $40. The whole point of tracking prices is to know if you should buy now or wait, so you need to be able to assess whether the discounted price is realistic and 12 months seems like a good arbitrary period. But of course products often get cheaper over time so perhaps that’s not necessary for many and just would add complexity.

[musicsoftwaredeals]

Thanks very much for this feedback its incredibly useful! To answer your questions:

1. Yes we'll improve the colours for the store
2. Yes we need to add some product description for SEO purposes too so will eventually do that
3. For search results, you can save any filter via the URL. For example if you untick particular manufacturers, set price limits, you'll see the URL updates with the new criteria. Then you just save that URL and when you go back to it, it will update with the new results.
4. You can "sort" by manufacturer if you click on the "More Options" section and then select the manufacturers you want to see there
5. We could do freebies but there are not many overall. For example here are the products $0-$1 and there's only 1 of them that are free currently
6. Can you explain what you mean by fitting the lowest price in the last 12 months on the product results. Do you mean if a product is on sale, but not hit its lowest price in the past 12 months, then show the lowest price it has hit in the past 12 months on that product tile?
7. The "Not On Sale" bug you mentioned is just actually something we need to make clearer. That product is not on sale currently but the last price was $19 on sale. So we're going to improve how we show that so it won't cross out the full price, but instead will just show full price and "Last sale price" as the sale figure.

Love to hear any other feedback you have!

Yes, sorry, forgot to reply to this. I didn’t say it very well - what I mean is adding the Lowest Price figure from the product page to the product tiles in the search results.

If I search for Sound Particles 6FX bundle then I can see the current best price is $480 and the last five sale prices but can’t see that it has been at $233.78 in October this year until I go to the product page.

Seeing those two figures side by side is interesting information and it would be nice to see it in search results too if it doesn’t add too much clutter.

The reason I mentioned “lowest price in the last 12 months” was that it wouldn’t be useful to know that, say, PluginName was discounted from $100 to $25 in 2018 if since then it’s never been lower than $40. The whole point of tracking prices is to know if you should buy now or wait, so you need to be able to assess whether the discounted price is realistic and 12 months seems like a good arbitrary period. But of course products often get cheaper over time so perhaps that’s not necessary for many and just would add complexity.

Cool thanks for getting back to me. I guess we don't want to completely overload the "tiles" in the search results with too much info or they will be unreadable. There is already a lot of info on the search results tiles.

However, all of the data you want to see is available in the price history page for each product with just one click (which you get by clicking on the product image or the chart icon). For example:

https://musicsoftwaredeals.com/price-hi ... ndo-34609/

You can see the lowest price ever, the date of it, current active sales etc. all in one place.

Let me know if you have any questions or other feedback!

[Double Tap]

Cool thanks for getting back to me. I guess we don't want to completely overload the "tiles" in the search results with too much info or they will be unreadable. There is already a lot of info on the search results tiles.

However, all of the data you want to see is available in the price history page for each product with just one click (which you get by clicking on the product image or the chart icon). For example:

https://musicsoftwaredeals.com/price-hi ... ndo-34609/

You can see the lowest price ever, the date of it, current active sales etc. all in one place.

Let me know if you have any questions or other feedback!

Yes I do get what you mean and if you added another number to the tile it would need to be obvious what it was referring to, so it could add to the clutter - it would probably need a redesign. I could give you some use cases but maybe it's just something to think if you get to a point where you do want to redesign.

In the meantime, some things that might be easier to do:

- exclude a manufacturer from search results.

- exclude sound packs or presets from search results.

- exclude bundles from search results.

[teob111]

This platform is amazing !

[musicsoftwaredeals]

This platform is amazing !

Thanks Feel free to let us know if you have any feedback!

[musicsoftwaredeals]

Cool thanks for getting back to me. I guess we don't want to completely overload the "tiles" in the search results with too much info or they will be unreadable. There is already a lot of info on the search results tiles.

However, all of the data you want to see is available in the price history page for each product with just one click (which you get by clicking on the product image or the chart icon). For example:

https://musicsoftwaredeals.com/price-hi ... ndo-34609/

You can see the lowest price ever, the date of it, current active sales etc. all in one place.

Let me know if you have any questions or other feedback!

Yes I do get what you mean and if you added another number to the tile it would need to be obvious what it was referring to, so it could add to the clutter - it would probably need a redesign. I could give you some use cases but maybe it's just something to think if you get to a point where you do want to redesign.

In the meantime, some things that might be easier to do:

- exclude a manufacturer from search results.

- exclude sound packs or presets from search results.

- exclude bundles from search results.

Thanks this is great feedback, appreciated. Its possible to select only seeing specific categories, manufacturers etc. but not exclude them. So we'll definitely add that to our list of features to add thanks!

[planetearth]

Just stumbled across this and checked out the site. It looks like this is taking shape and could be very useful by Black Friday, but please, please, for the love of All Things Good and Pure, would you PLEASE denote dollar amounts properly? They should be "$5", "$10", etc., not the "5$" or "10$" as shown at the top of the page. They're wrong at the very top ("Deals under 5$" and just below the search area.)

The dollar amounts are denoted properly where it appears you're actually pulling data from other sites. Other than that, this looks quite professional and useful, thanks!

Steve

[musicsoftwaredeals]

Huh good point! I never noticed actually apologies - sometimes Europeans seem to do it that way and I never know why. Will update asap

[musicsoftwaredeals]

Just stumbled across this and checked out the site. It looks like this is taking shape and could be very useful by Black Friday, but please, please, for the love of All Things Good and Pure, would you PLEASE denote dollar amounts properly? They should be "$5", "$10", etc., not the "5$" or "10$" as shown at the top of the page. They're wrong at the very top ("Deals under 5$" and just below the search area.)

The dollar amounts are denoted properly where it appears you're actually pulling data from other sites. Other than that, this looks quite professional and useful, thanks!

Steve

Fixed now