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[DedEye]

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[Can'thavenuthingood]

If you build it, we will come.

Vick

[bobfried]

There is somethign similar. Nowhere near what Pricegrabber offers but darn good if you wanted to compare prices with shipping. Especially on ammo.

http://gun-deals.com/index.php

Click the tabs on top of the page to go to the subcategories, I find the best feature is the "cost per round" sort ability in the ammo section.

[trashman]

Why isn't there a website similar to Pricegrabber specifically for gun products?

I think the first answer is demographics. Folks have been buying guns the same way (at gun stores) for decades; many (most, maybe?) of your established buyers were born in the 40's and 50's, and still don't look to the Internet for information the way your Gen-Xers and beyond do as a matter of daily course.

Second answer is that you can't actually BUY the damn things on the internet and have them shipping to your home. The transactional hassle for first-time buyers (finding a local FFL that will accept out of state xfers, understanding the economics and legalities of buying from a non-local dealer) is pretty high, too.

Third is just tendencies within generational groups; Gen-Xers and beyond are...obsessed....with finding the lowest-cost deal. It's an innate part of being a nerd IMO.

Having said all that, though -- I find Gunbroker to be a useful tool a la pricewatch/pricegrabber *if you know what you are looking for*. Identifying FFL's who are just trying to move inventory as fast as possible (Budsgunshop e.g.) is part of effective price benchmarking.

Sadly though -- none of this reflects the gun community's need too support our local shops. Doing business in California is expensive -- but the higher wages across the state tend to compensate for that, and we need to keep as many FFL's as we can in business here in the state.

--Neill

[DRM6000]

is there something in particular you're looking for?

[DRM6000]

Best price on the LMT (the one I want most) is $55 from Bravo Company.

.

does that $55 include shipping? they retail for $49.

[squeky]

There is no "grabber" because a grabber would be almost impossible to write with gun dealers setting up their shops using many methods (and probably most of the time not knowing how it works). Getting cooperation from vendors is going to be impossible.

So, that leaves the other option of having them submit it somewhere, such as the EE on arfcom. Seems that they will do that as long as they can have something that sets them apart from the competition--a nice bold headline or yellow highlighting. IMO, most dealers will not put their stuff up somewhere if other companies stuff is up and the playing field is even. Why do I think?

The link posted above is my site. I've been trying for over a year for such a system. Vendors are welcome to submit their stuff for free, and so far 2 have. Not that they keep up, but they have prior. Maybe the site isn't driving enough hits to them? It's easier to build a nice site than it is to really really get the word out about it. Any kind of community site requires TONS of visitors--I get 20,000/month and it's not close to what I need to have vendors take notice.

[squeky]

Cool deal, thanks for popping in . It's definitely a nice start, but my dream site is automated (hence the problem), automatically finding the best deals. I just don't get why Pricegrabber (for example) doesn't work for gun parts (not the firearms themselves, but the uppers, sights and other accessories) like it does for other products. Anti-gun bias?

Thanks. I'm actively developing, so maybe one day it may be closer to your "dream" I'm not 100% certain how pricegrabber works, but I think they don't index firearms sites are 1) no cooperation from vendors, 2) no standard, 3) too many stores with few products. Pricegrabber is good for one store that carries 10,000 items. Gun and ammo stores carry very little. I "inspired" another site indexing ammo, and he wrote all kinds of stuff to grab prices automatically. The bad thing--each store has it's own set of grabbers, so the site only indexes like 5 stores. I can only imagine how much work went into indexing 5 stores. There is no standard--some stores just use dumb old HTML and probably update it by hand. I'd like to see a grabber for that, yikes. They change a couple things and the grabber is broken. Of course, the real answer is XML, which is probably how price grabber works. Try getting these HTML guys to output a standard XML format, or write an API for them to use . These mega technology (or just mega) stores have no problem outputting as a web service (XML) that others can use.