The official blog of Jonathan Haslett

CouponShare has been my most popular project so far, it now has its own domain at play-asia-couponshare.com.

Most of the discussion about the site is happening over on a forum called StrikeBang, here is a link to the thread. (You may need to join the forum to see the thread.)

More changes to CouponShare:

• Prevented hot linking directly to a coupon url, now there it is much harder to get coupons without following affiliate links.
• Started recording statistical information like where traffic is coming from.
• Created a hot links panel that shows the top 10 referring domains, a nice way to give back to site that send me traffic.
• Made it so that if a coupon will always display on the day it was added, regardless of if it is used or not, this means that all coupons will feature on the site for at least a day and helps stop people from deliberately deleting added coupons before they are used.
• Added a “marked as used” message for coupons that are marked as used but still visible because they were posted today.

Check it out at couponshare.almostepic.com

CouponShare has seen a few teething problems. Primarily some users have been marking other users coupons as used so that they can post the first users code as their own to try and steal their affiliate clicks.

Over the last few days I have made some improvements to CouponShare:

• Users can no longer enter a coupon that has already been submitted.
• Error message now appear letting the user know what went wrong when a coupon submission fails.

As you can probably guess from my last blog post I have been ordering some games from play-asia.com.

It seems that every order they ship they include a coupon code that gets you or someone else a discount on their next order.

I have noticed forum threads popping up all over the interwebs with people posting and sharing these coupon codes. Most codes are single use and used up within minutes of someone posting them making it really hard to find current and usable codes.

What I couldn’t find was a nice simple way for people to share their codes and find current ones without having to spend hours searching the web.

So I am attempting to make one.

Enter couponshare.almostepic.com, the place to share and find coupon codes for play-asia.com.

But what about affiliate links?

Some of the people posting coupon codes online are trying to get people to click on their affiliate links so that they can take a commission on whatever the coupon user buys from the store.

Couponshare.almostepic.com give the user the option to enter their affiliate link while posting a new code. When a user clicks to view the coupon code they see the code and are also taken to the affiliate link meaning that those after affiliate sales are more likely to get them than those who post their coupons elsewhere.

Some features I would like to add the couponshare.almostepic.com in the near future are:

• RSS feed to alert people when new codes are posted.
• Style Sheet to make the site more attractive.

This is one for people in Australia. A lot of Aussies have noticed something strange lately, with the AU Dollar buying $0.93 (Thats awesome btw) there has never been a better time to buy your goods online in USD.

Back a few years ago when an AUD would buy you $0.45 USD it made sense that things were about twice the price here.

Games for example (which a fair portion of my incomes goes toward) will retail for ~$50 to ~$60 in the states where as here in Australia a AAA game can sell for as much as $119 AUD.

With the changes in currency values over the last year you would think that those a list games would now cost about $60 to $70 AUD. You were wrong, for some reason, somewhere along the supply chain someone feels the need to be greedy and blatantly rob us in broad daylight.

PS3 and XBOX 360 games are region free, what that means is that a game from the shelves will work without any problems in an Australian version console. So why not just buy you games in the US Version in USD from somewhere overseas via an online store.

A few months ago I found the website I have been looking for!

Enter…. Drum Roll….

www.play-asia.com  <<—- THESE GUYS ARE TOTALLY AWESOME

They are a Hong Kong based games and media importer who stock US, Japan and Asian versions of games for all the latest consoles, PC, Mac as well as a huge back catalouge of games and accessories for older systems.

So far I have purchased 3 brand new PS3 games from their store, each of them retails for over $100AUD here in Australia and including shipping each one only cost me $65 to $70 I would have saved even more if I had of ordered them together and combined the shipping.

The games took about a week to get here and have worked perfectly ever since.

Show the games industry that they cant just RIP IS OFF like this anymore by not purchasing overpriced Australian version games and get your games from  www.play-asia.com.

Another great thing is that whenever you get an order from www.play-asia.com they send you a coupon that you can use to get a $5 discount off your next purchase making the next game you get EVEN BETTER VALUE.

Try them out and see for yourself.

I want to know what you think about the pricing situation in the Australian games industry, Play-Asia and importing games in general so please leave me some comments.