What Kiwi Game Bazaar is, and how it reads New Zealand shops

Kiwi Game Bazaar started with a simple frustration. If you want a particular physical game in New Zealand, say a PAL copy of Okami for the PlayStation 2 or a boxed Pokémon Emerald, there is no one place to look. You check a handful of local shops one by one, then Trade Me, then give up and try again next month.

So this site does the checking for you.

A game page first

Every game here has its own page: what it is, which platforms it came out on, when it released in PAL territories, and which New Zealand shops have a copy tonight, with the price, the condition and what's included, as each shop describes it. The catalogue comes from Wikidata and IGDB, and it runs much deeper than the shelf: most games have a page even when nobody has one in stock, so search is the fastest way to tell "never heard of it" from "nobody has one right now".

How we read the shops

Once a night, we read each shop's public product feed: the same catalogue the shop publishes for anyone to see. We match each product against our release catalogue, record what it costs and whether it's in stock, and link straight back to the shop's own page. We don't sell anything and we don't take a cut: follow the link and the shop takes it from there.

A few rules we hold ourselves to:

• Only what's public. We read feeds a shop already publishes openly. No logins, no workarounds, nothing a shop has not chosen to show the world.
• We say who we are. Every request we make carries our name and a link to our contact page, so a shop can see exactly who is reading and get in touch.
• Gently. One pass a night, with a pause between pages, so we are never a noticeable load on anyone's site.
• We link back, always. The point is to send you to the shop.

Honest numbers

Every figure on the site is something we actually observed, not an estimate of what exists. Some nights get missed and shops come and go. Where that matters to a number, we say so right beside it. The Restocked shelf, for instance, tells you how many of the last seven nights we actually collected.

If something looks wrong, or you run a shop and want to talk, the contact page reaches the one person behind the site.