Costco Backyard Upgrades event deals. While Supplies Last.

Wow TMI

I'm always looking for ways to improve my posts here.

When I first started posting these Costco aggregation posts, it was all simply one big list of products in a table. I was actually very surprised it took off the way it did.

A complaint was made that it's too hard to find things, so I started to look into how to add categories to make things easier to look through.

I also looked into including value-added features and I was able to provide discount percentages into the list. I even sorted them so people could see easily which products were discounted the most.

In addition to all that, I added tags such as to indicate when products were for member's only (*) and/or out of stock (red OOS) to quickly mark products at a glance.

Member prices are usually locked behind sign-in and membership id. My posts reveal the member pricing, and this can serve as a way for a curious non-member to see prices and compare and shop as well.

I have other tricks up my sleeve that I haven't put into play yet, such as being able to provide ratings data for product, shipping costs pre-calculated into the final costs, in-store actual costs possibly, etc. And I'm evaluating how I can incorporate them into the charts without adding clutter. These ideas are not yet implemented but could be seen in future posts.

Now with regards to the complaint about 0% discounted products, I've thought about ways to take that out of the clutter. Perhaps I can shift the products with a 0% discount into the Wiki instead so that the main post would simply display only discounted products.

Also, it's not my intention to upset people here by randomly triggering deal alerts on my post. I'm not sure how these deal alert triggers work, but if it's based on my initial post, I could post a near-empty post, and later edit in the content. (I think editing doesn't trigger deal alerts? but correct me if I'm wrong.)

Truthfully, sometimes I don't see the deals in the content that I post and I wonder if I should even post them. However, with each post I make, it continually surprises me how members upvote and threads get promoted to front page. So I feel like most community members are seeing some value out of these posts. And if that's the case, I'm going to keep experimenting and posting.

I know Costco is really popular here. People love their warranties and easy returns. They generally have high quality products and for a good base price. So any discounts, however small it can be, are just added bonus.

The idea behind the benefits of these posts are many though. One of which I've already touched on above, which is to have an all-in-one page that compacts the information in an easy to read format and to get a good overall summary everything quickly. How quickly can you get that same information browsing Costco's website?

As my posts are generally themed, it allows users of similar interests, in this case here, those members who like yard/home improvements, to share their experiences and talk about the products provided and whether they're good/bad/whatever and if they're even a deal. Even if the talk is not about the deal, it fosters talk about the products on sale, while building community.

There are other things here too that I feel are good. Deals posted in this format become immediately searchable and active users can find the deal with the search bar. And then when the deals expire, these posts also serve as a history/archive for users to look back on to compare when they're thinking about newer/current deals and decide whether they're worth it.

Well anyways, most people are probably not going to read through all this, but just thought I'd share my thoughts on the matter. Sorry if it's a little much.

If anyone gets that playhouse pay the extra $200 to have Costco build.
Local companies wanted $500 to build it, took me 14 hours to build a smaller one.