Group Buy Aggregator

Hey all. I’ll keep this brief-ish.

I worked on something to use as an aggregator for active group buys because I feel like I keep learning about GBs that I just missed because I didn’t hear about them until it was too late. I wanted the tool I made to be searchable, sortable, and filterable.

I am currently the only person working on this particular project (code, dev ops, and data entry), so the number of listings isn’t heavily populated yet. I wanted to capture some cool listings that caught my eye while also sharing this with the community to gauge if this is something you all would find useful.

I’m not leaving off anyone’s GB intentionally now or in the future, so, if you’d like to see a buy added to this aggregator, send me a PM with a link to the GB and any other relevant details, and I’ll get it added. I’m planning to go searching for buys to add this weekend myself. If you see any details that are incorrect, please PM me, and I’ll get them updated as quickly as possible.

The plan is to remove buys that have ended within a week of them ending to allow for wiggle room if I was slightly off on the end date or if the buy got extended.

I’m not going to prioritize anyone’s group buy over others because this is just meant to be an informational tool to help the community not an advertising platform, so please don’t ask.

So, I didn’t keep this brief… but uhhhhh here ya go: https://www.vanderleystudios.com/portfolio/group-buy-tool

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This is fantastic! Great work, I’ve also been wishing something like this existed!

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This is a great Idea, thank you for having donne that!

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Quick update - Someone PM’ed me and suggested adding a feature to show past group buys. I went ahead and added that functionality. Past GB’s is obviously empty for now, but that’ll fill up as I start marking group buys as no longer active as they conclude.

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This is sick. Thank you!

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What a helpful project! The information is very easy to get quickly and it looks great, too. I like the style of the radio buttons and hyperlinked text. Well done.

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Thanks!

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Wow this is great. I like that you included both keyboard group buys as well as keyset group buys. I know there is a Google Sheet out there, but it mainly only displays keyset group buys. Here’s the link to it. Maybe it can help you populate your database.

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I like this! Thanks so much Ty :slight_smile:

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@TheNamesTy45 Im not sure how to do it, but I know there is a way to do it with Excel, where you can essentially grab all the information from a shreadsheet and populate a form with it that gets submitted and uplaoded. That might enable you to kind of “open source” all the leg work where you could pick some trusted people who go in and fill the information out on a google doc and then the site gets updated. That might make it easier to maintain and keep the sire up to date while missing fewer GBs.

Again just a thought. I love and appreciate everything you are doing :smile:

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Thank you so much for this! I recently made a thread on MK asking how people keep up w/ group buys and someone suggests keyclack’s website and gave me this excel form with keycap gb’s which helped. I also found being in a million mk related discords helped but was a bit messy. The UI of your site looks really clean! I love the colors. I will be adding it to my bookmark tab lol. This might be a bit too much to ask but I think it would be cool if you had pictures of the product on the info card. Just a suggestion. The links to the geekhack works just as well too.

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Thanks for the support and feedback so far everyone!

@SlipperyPeteED I think you’re 100% in line with something I’m thinking about doing. I have all of this data on a CMS, so data entry is really easy for people with access. As an example, here is one of the listings:

I created this schema (IsActive is kinda a misnomer, but it was late and made sense to me at the time) and I can add or remove parts as needed and then set my code to look for the payload it gets back.

The short of the above is that I may end up paying for a higher tier plan so that I can add more collaborators to populate the backend, store more data, and increase the number of monthly requests I can make to the DB (it’s metered right now to 50,000 monthly requests at which point it cuts off until next month). Right now we’re in really good shape, but may need that if the tool takes off.

image

I’ve had one community member reach out about helping out with data entry and maintenance, and I’m going to think on it some over the next day or two, but I’ll probably end up adding at least one person to help with this.

@astrobrite I thought a lot about pictures (and maybe will add them in the future). Few main reasons I didn’t:

  • I don’t have a ton of room for images in the CMS I’m using right now.
  • I want to make sure that the page loads as fast as possible and doesn’t drain data on mobile users. If each of these GBs had an image, I’m worried I’d increase page load time and run up mobile data usage if browsing off of wifi (I’m on Google Fi, so I’m acutely aware of when a webpage has giant assets because it’s tied to a dollar amount for me)
  • I don’t want to get into a situation where I’m grabbing someone’s image without asking permission and they get upset about it.
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that sounds awesome! Well if you do need help with data entry, id love to help. I understand that you must be very selective with people, but id love to be involved in anyway possible!

I love what you are doing and this has the potential to be great for the community as a whole!

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Thanks for the offer. I’m definitely going to keep that in mind. When I start getting ready to add some other contributors I’ll definitely PM you to see if you’re still interested.

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Wow, this is really cool! Thank you!

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okay, you just made what I’m planning to do as a project to learn front end stuff. lol.

Awesome work!

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Ha, thank you! Front-end work can be a lot of fun for days you’re feeling more creative. The back-end work is also really nice to retreat to when I just feel like dealing with data and not so much browser rendering differences.

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