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Comment by zapstar | Hacker News Reader

I'm working on a website that calculates the unit prices on Amazon products. Hoping to help save people some money, since there are a surprising amount of times where buying in smaller quantities actually saves you money.

The website is https://unitprice.org/browse if anyone is interested! It's still very much in its infancy, but I plan on doing a "Show HN" soon! Based on the last two weeks, I have only made about $10, but that's been with very little traffic so far.

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>I'm working on a website that calculates the unit prices on Amazon products.

Oh hey. Actual built a prototype around this. And even bought some domains that sounded similar.

I abandoned it when Amazon blocked my cloud scrapper. Also seemed quite manual labour intensive since the quantities displayed are so inconsistent.

Yeah, you can’t sneak past Amazon too easily. I am using their official API, so I’m trying to follow all of their rules and policies. Otherwise, I lose my affiliate status, and beyond having fun with this data, those affiliate fees are a significant motivator.

Good stuff. May I ask what route took you to affil? Blog?

Are you asking what led me to create a website that focuses on affiliate links? (If that's wrong, please correct!) I decided to create a website like this because I like this type of data, and it blended naturally with the potential upside of affiliate marketing fees. I wrote somewhere on the site about what first led me to this idea -- I was buying pacifiers for my kid, and it was cheaper to buy two two-packs than one four-pack. That made me realize that you can't always assume that larger quantities have a cheaper cost. Figured it would be cool to apply that sort of calculation at a much larger scale!

Do paper towels & toilet paper please :)

I've added some initial paper towel and toilet paper listings, FYI! More to come, so expect an even better deal later this evening! https://unitprice.org/categories/home

I will! Thanks for the suggestion! I have heard that from some friends as well.

I thought Amazon does show you the unit prices?

Good question. Sometimes Amazon does, and sometimes Amazon does not, even within the same product category. Or sometimes it will mix and match the unit. For example, sometimes they will provide the price per ounce for K-cups, and other times, it will provide the price per cup. Not very useful when wanting to do a comparison.

For each of these items that I list, I have manually audited the unit count (after usually automatically doing an initial guess). For many, there's not even an automatic guess, so I have to read the description, look at the photo, etc., in order to determine the unit count.

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