I’ve talked about Booko as the best place to buy books in Australia. For computer hardware and accessories, there’s staticice.com, a search engine that allows you to search for a computer parts across stores all over Australia and ranks the results by price. Unfortunately it doesn’t calculate shipping prices for you like Booko, but it lets you immediately find the cheapest in-store price. This is great for consumers because if this service becomes popular, then it puts pressure on computer hardware stores to compete in price resulting in lower prices.
I hope more of these price comparison search engines come up for different niches. Especially for the mobile phones market. It’s a mess in Australia with artificially complex price structures where call charges are much higher than the price you actually pay so advertisers can use phrases like, “pay $20 and get $80 of value”. It’s impossible for a consumer to compare plans across the mobile market, and mobile companies like it that way because they don’t have to compete on price.
UPDATE:
Commenters also mentioned www.shopbot.com.au, www.myshopping.com.au, www.myshopping.com.au, and pricecompare.com.au as good product comparison websites, although I haven’t used them enough to recommend them, so I won’t link them directly 
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There’s also ShopBot — http://www.shopbot.com.au/
It’s more for general tech goods (cameras, TVs, computer accessories & peripherals) than computer parts, so fills a slightly different niche. It also claims a few other markets (fashion, food, health) though I’ve not used it apart from the tech goods.
cool, thanks for the tip.
I find that with aggregate shopping websites like this, the more focused the niche, the more valuable the website because the creators focus on getting it just right for the targeted audience.
It’s hard to build a catalogue of every single electronic store that sells electronics in Australia, so an aggregate website that has to does this for too many products can’t have the best prices because it’s more likely that there are missing stores on the list.
It’s also rare to see someone go, I want a camcorder of this exact model for the cheapest price…but while I’m at it, I’ll pick up some shampoo as well.
With tech products, most people know what they want, a dvd player, a laptop, a tv (and accessories), so anything else that doesn’t belong in that category is just a distraction.
Aggregating electronics and appliances is a hard problem though. It’s much less like a commodity, so price isn’t the only thing that gets people to buy. There are lots of different warranty deals to choose from, you can find deals on sets of items (e.g. camera + tripod at a discount), and it changes all the time…the more parameters you have in determining whether something is the best, the harder it is to have an aggregate that works for everyone. When you have situations like that, making it social rather than automatic might be better (ozbargain.com.au is a really good example of that)
Maybe I’m too picky
but I’ve thought a lot about building my own aggregate website for a niche 
There’s quite a few price comparison engines around that are good for computer components,
pricecompare.com.au
getprice.com.au
myshopping.com.au
just to mention a few.
Thanks Pc Guys, I’ll check them out! Getprice and pricecompare seem pretty good from a few quick searches. myshopping doesn’t seem to have a big range yet.