ThriftHunting.com is an online community for the modern day treasure hunter. Basically for anyone who enjoys the thrill of looking for valuable items at thrift stores, garage sales, yard sales, etc. This website also hosts an online utility named "hunter" that uses an item's UPC or ISBN to search for the minimum price as listed on various websites.

This website came about due to an ebay purchase I made awhile ago for a portable scanner. Before I get into why I purchased the scanner here's a little background info on me. Trust me...it'll all lead back to the scanner.

For the longest time I was an ebay newbie, beginner, freshman...however you want to put it. I basically knew what ebay was but had no experience using it. That was until I moved away from home and realized I just had way too much stuff. Several of my ebay fanatic friends suggested that I put my stuff up on ebay. So I made the effort, took pics, and put a majority of my old stuff up on ebay (listing most items for 99 cents just to get rid of them). To my surprise a lot of the items sold. An even bigger surprise was that my old college books were selling in the double digits.

After several batches of my old stuff I basically ran out of items to list. My natural progression was to look for used items at thrift stores and garage sales to put up on ebay. I had always enjoyed thrift store shopping and garage sales. This was even before I made the jump to selling stuff on ebay. To me it always felt like a modern day treasure hunt. So the thrift hunting began, the only problem was that I had no clue what to look for. I would walk around a store, completely overwhelmed at the shear amount of "stuff" they had, and go home empty-handed.

After several trips I started migrating to the book section. I figured that maybe I could find some college books similar to the ones I already sold. I sort of had a system for awhile, writing down titles and then looking them up at home to see if they were worth anything. Needless to say, at that pace, I was processing maybe 5 books at a time. I knew there had to be a better way. So I started researching book cataloging and found a pocket-sized portable scanner that was able to store 150 UPCs in its memory. When I saw that, I knew it was just what I needed. No longer would I have to take mental notes of items or scribble down book titles.

I bought the scanner and decided to take it a step further and put to use some of my programming skills. I started designing a program that would take each UPC, lookup information about the item, but most importantly output a price that would help me determine whether or not the item was worth buying. For that I decided to lookup minimum prices from several websites where the item was being sold. I figured with that information known, I would know a good bargain when I saw one.

After the program was finished I started using it at local stores. I basically got into a routine of scanning as many items as I could, bringing the information home, and running the information through the utility. This would help create a list of items I would buy when I returned to the store. This worked, but I wanted something more. I wanted to be able to access my utility online (from right there at the store)...not just from my home computer. It was at this point that I started researching website design. To my surprise, in my researching efforts, I realized that websites for looking up media prices already existed! I wasn't going to pay $14 a month for such a utility though. I mean I already wrote a program that did everything I needed. Now all I had to do was get it online so I could access it.

I started designing ThriftHunting.com. At the same time I was still researching and looking for tips on how to buy and sell used books. I found great stories of lucky finds people had, tips from professional book resellers (who buy and sell used books for a living), and lots of questions from people just starting out (like me). All these great stories and tips spanned several websites though. It was then that I realized what I wanted the website to be. I mean, yes, I wanted to get my utility online but I also wanted to build a community website for people to get together with others who enjoyed "thrift hunting". And that's pretty much how this website came about. So if you find the utility helpful, that's great! If not, please let me know what I could do to improve it (I will try my best to implement suggestions). Above all else though I hope you enjoy the community. Even if you don't use the utility (or use some other online website for your media lookup needs) the main goal for this website is the community and I hope you become apart of that community.

Your fellow community member,
LuckyScanner