Howdy y'all. I noticed, much to my chagrin, after placing a couple of large orders at 5 star that the deal finder feature didn't give me the best deals. After strolling around a few of the other affiliates, I saw that I had paid about $2 more per title at 5 star than at a competitor. 5 Star basically said that they already shipped the items and they couldn't help me out. I don't mind sucking up a buck or two here and there but when you order a lot at a time it adds up quickly. Is there anything wrong with the feature that we should know about? Thanks
Don - I don't know of any errors. Could you share the specifics on which titles and prices you think are screwed up? This is how Deal Finder works: Once per day a seperate table of "deals" is updated. A deal is a title available at two or more stores that with at least a $2 difference between the lowest priced store and the second lowest priced store. The Deal Finder table only updates once per day since it's a very time consuming process for the server. Many of the stores' prices update four times per day in the price search. This scheduling difference could account for any variance in the titles listed in Deal Finder.
Well, for example, all Sunshine dvd's are $12.95 at laser's edge. They are listed at the deal finder as being best priced by several dollars (sometimes more) at 5 star with no mention of laser's edge. Laser's edge lowered their prices on 7/20 but the search still doesn't even list them for these titles. There was another example but this is the most obvious. Thanks
While we are on the topic of problems, I am having a search problem. Whenever I do a search from the home page, I get a "Sorry, your search returned no matches." result. But if I do the exact same search from the Search Results page (the one that shows the error above), I get the results that I should have gotten from the original search.
Bill - are you trying to search by performer name on the home page? It's not clear that the home page box doesn't support performer searches. I will add a mechanism to search by performer from the home page later this morning.
Don - just for clarification: Are you saying that Deal Finder listed Five Star as the lowest price for an item even though it was priced less at another store?
I looked into this a bit. I think the reason that you are seeing this is that Laser's Edge simply carries fewer Sunshine titles than some of the other stores. I did a quick check for Sunshine in the database. Laser's Edge has 278 Sunshine titles in our database. Five Star has 379. (There are a total of 503 titles from Sunshine but not all of them are active. Sunshine put out a lot of stuff in the early days of DVD that has been discontinued.) After pulling this data I checked Deal Finder again for Sunshine deals at Five Star with $2 range. I checked a number of titles that listed Five Star as the cheapest and then verified that Laser's Edge does not have the same title available on their website. Reader's Digest version: I think Deal Finder is working properly. If you have specific titles that you would like me to investigate just drop me a note with the details (drew@adultdvdtalk.com). I have logs of all of the pricing changes for each store in the price search. I can track price changes back to the time that you placed your order. [This message has been edited by Drew Black (edited July 23, 2000).]
Well, I think I found something that could be a bug thanks to HoustonDon's help. If two stores had a price difference of $2 on a title (when selecting a $2 range in deal finder) the "deal" wouldn't appear. The difference in price needed to be greater than $2 (i.e. $2.01 or more) to appear in the Deal Finder results. This has been changed.
Hi Drew! Yes, I searched and found a number of titles that came up as best deals at 5 star that didn't even show laser's edge in the top 5 stores. When I originally searched, 5 star had a lot more "deals". It now appears to be fixed. Since the price was exactly $2 difference, even using a $2 "best price by $2" match should have eliminated the deal from the 5 star search. I think it's better now but I searched a few times before I started the thread (and well after the 24 hour update) so whatever you did must've worked. Thanks
Drew, No, I was not looking for a performer when searching on the home page. The most current example is that I was looking for "Mind Fuck" from Extreme. No matter how much of the title I enter, I get the "no match error", I just did it, just entering "mind" (the quotes are only for the purpose of this post, by the way, you are now getting an SQL server error message on your home page). When I get to the Search results page, "mind" returns 5 hits.
Bill - I tried searching for both 'Mind Fuck' and 'mind'. I got the proper search results for both. I tried this in both Netscape and IE just to make sure that the problem wasn't browser specific. The site was getting the SQL server errors for a good portion of the day today because the database server was down due to power problems.
Drew, Could we be talking about two different pages? I'm referring to the [url=466355]http://www.adultdvdpricesearch.com/</A page (which is where my bookmark is currently set). I don't seem to have a problem with the search from any of the adultdvdtalk pages. Should I be using adultdvdtalk instead of adultdvdpricesearch?
After strolling around a few of the other affiliates, I saw that I had paid about $2 more per title at 5 star than at a competitor. 5 Star basically said that they already shipped the items and they couldn't help me out.
