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Comment by throwayEngineer | Hacker News Reader

The price has me leaving to Walmart Online.

I recently wanted a blue alarm clock. Amazon was 20$. Walmart Online 10$.

I still use Amazon to price check, but I've started price checking numerous competitors.

Here is a study we did for baby items, but it was clear online>brick and mortar. Walmart>Amazon https://efficiencyiseverything.com/target-vs-amazon-vs-walma...

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There’s a plugin for price checking: http://www.shoptimate.com/extension/

What's the business model? Are they monetizing browsing history data?

Affiliate links.

Based on their privacy policy, it looks like they gather aggregate browsing data, which they may be monetizing. But they say that all data gathered is at the aggregate level.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/shoptimate/pr...

Maker of Shoptimate here. As said by others, the business model is simply affiliate links.

The gathering of browser data in the privacy policy is to cover things taken by my Apache logs or click statistics (which I sometimes need to charge stores that pay me per click). But I don't monetize this in any shape or form.

Thanks for responding! That totally makes sense. I am a bit wary about these sorts of things because even my small-time (under 100k users) Chrome extension has had offers for data collection/infiltration. So when I read a privacy policy that doesn't disclaim browsing history monetization, I figure it's probably because it's happening. Glad to hear that's not the case!

I'm guessing affiliate links.

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