Spadout.com Dead?

It seems as though spadout.com is no more. Their website and facebook page is gone. Their twitter account hasn't posted anything since 2011. The domain is still registered but the site has not worked in over a month. Anyone have a line on what happening here? Also, anyone know of similar sites to view various deals?

I used to use spadout. Too bad it's gone. I like those aggregators.

I'm surprised to find that they haven't worked in awhile either. It's very suspect that they are down. I wonder if they were bought out by a big retailer. They really helped me find stuff on sale.

Does anybody actually know what happened to them?

There was a MP.commer that worked for them. Leah, I think? Maybe she'll chime in.

Leah Miller, it was!

Wow - appears its dead. Yes - Leah Miller use to work for them, but a long time ago.

You guys can try ActiveBacker.com - even better - 90% of the profits go to awesome outdoor organizations (a lot of them local to Colorado - like the Boulder Climbing Community)

(disclaimer: I built activebacker.com)

Thanks Dave! I'm going to give it a try.

Awesome - its a hobby project of mine - let me know if there are any features you would really like and I can see about adding them.

Wow this is now the top result for googling "spadout". I wonder why they took it down.

I like your site Dave, that's a really good idea doing croud funding. I also have a project searchforgear.com that I built to price check gear..

I was donating a portion of profits to the Access Fund for a while but I got spooked due to possible terms of service issues with affiliate links. Have you run into any of that with your site?

I've been using gearchase.com for price comparison since spadout died, but I'm glad to see alternatives that support good causes. I'll definitely use the two sites mentioned above.

Hi nbwoodward,
Thanks for checking out the site. Great job on your site, searchforgear. I haven't ran into any issues with affiliate links, what was it that made you worry?

Gearchase is also great, thanks Joanne!

Oh yea also - nbwoodwward, funny you say its the top result, I've been gitting 300~ hits a month from this post, that explains it :D

Used to use spadout too, but then I was finding better deals on my own. And most were really obvious. I kind of figured that "sponsorship" might be playing with the results, and the main sites were offering equal or bigger discounts.

I think most sites like that are pretty short lived by nature. Unless of course it is looking for airline flights. :o)

Also Google has become pretty tough on these types of sites. If you look at the traffic for spadout (or activejunky for example) - traffic decreased quite a bit over the last ~3 years. Unless your doing it as a hobby project, its tough to stay float.

Thanks Joanne, we're all just climbing bums trying to get away from the day job :).

Dave, I'm glad you're getting some traffic from this. Hopefully it turns into a good user base for you!

Scott, in answer to your comment, aggregate sites like mine and Dave's show results from well over a hundred online outdoor stores. I've found some pretty good deals on my site that I wouldn't have found on my own.

However, for various reasons aggregate sites don't always pick up on promotions such as "enter CODE10 to get 10% off your order". Personally, I use my site as a tool while I'm doing research on what gear to buy. When I'm looking for a specific item, it tells me who has it and if there's any sales going on. I often check a few of the retailers to see if there are any promotions. Generally, I rely on Backcountry and REI to find reviews and get gear specs, then use searchforgear.com to see if I can find items cheaper anywhere else.

As far as "sponsorship playing with the results" I haven't found that to be true. From the merchant's perspective, since there is so much competition, they want to be seen as the site with the best deals. Also, a user that buys a sale item and has a good experience with the merchant is much more likely to use them again for other purchases. That means they are very active in making sure their sales are seen. This includes passing the info along through their sponsored links.

None of the sites linked above compare well to Spadout and I doubt I'll use any of those as they are currently set up. Spadout was rocking and I used it all the time. If you wanted a certain brand of gear, you could go and sort until you had 6 retailers with it, or if you wanted a list of non-locking biners you could sort based on price or greatest percentage off. Bam. Good stuff.

Sad to see it go. There appears to be nothing like it now.

My google search of "Spadout down?" also brought me first hit to this post. Guess it is dead since it's been half a year since the original posting.

Meantime, if folks are looking for more alternatives, I think www.weighmyrack.com is the closest thing to Spadout. (I run the site, our goal is to show every single piece of climbing gear available [not just gear that's on sale] and then show you the lowest price). We use the same pricefinding platform that Spadout did (it's called Avantlink) so we should be showing the same type of deals they had. This includes gear filters for each category (like gate type, price, weight, etc).

Edit: You can find the lowest price each piece of gear is available at the link above, but you can't filter for sale-gear only (yet). If you're looking specifically for sale-only gear then blog.weighmyrack.com/all-th… is a better bet.

SPAM ^^^^^^

It's not spam - they are suggesting an alternative to the topic of this post (which I think is really well done - nice job AlpineAlison!)

You seem to have a solid base of data for the gear, and its really clean and easy to use.
Best of luck with it.
Dave

So where did they go?

Billcoe wrote:So where did they go?

I don't know, but this site shows the same price for Moccasyms across the board. Huh?

gearchase.com/search/produc…

Spadout showed price variations, which every product had. Kind of strange seeing the exact same price for every vendor.

Stich wrote: I don't know, but this site shows the same price for Moccasyms across the board. Huh? gearchase.com/search/produc… Spadout showed price variations, which every product had. Kind of strange seeing the exact same price for every vendor.

I'm seeing differences--Climb High is at 20% off but most are around the list price. There are also multiple appearances of the same vendor (six from Backwoods, for example) at the same price.

But what's with "US Outdoor Store" showing Moccasyms with a list price of $320 discounted to the (actual) list price of $124.95?