Show HN: Find the cheapest Amazon for your books | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Find the cheapest Amazon for your books

piranhas.co

30 pointsk33l0r26 comments

This could be quite useful to students or those that order a bulk number of books regularly.

I would include the word 'country' in the title.

You should have a bottom line conversion into a currency that is understandable to the user so they can see the overall price difference. I know you highlight the cheapest - but it should be shown to the user so they know what the saving is.

Some improvements do need to be made as some prices were blank / not pulled through but when I checked directly they were significantly cheaper than the one that was highlighted.

Cool idea and agreed with needing the word "country" in the title. I didn't know what the site was for when I first came in. I had to click on a book in your "Try these" list to understand. Maybe include a sub-title that says "Not all books are priced the same on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, etc. Search to find which Amazon country-specific website has the cheapest price to buy your books."

Thanks for that, I paraphrased your suggestion almost directly to the site. The change will be online soonish.

Thanks for the feedback, I'm adding a row with converted totals at the moment.

Some of the prices are blank because of the way different editions of the same book are available in different countries. Also, if that specific edition of the book was only available from third party sellers the price will not be shown.

  "We can't search for anything if this is empty :-("

It's not empty though... it says "chad fowler". I understand this is just a placeholder, but for those who aren't developers and may not appreciate the difference, clicking search when the input field is empty should perform a search for the placeholder text.

Huh, never considered this before. If I had a placeholder username/password on my login box, should just clicking "login" take the user to a demo/guest account, or should it bounce them and tell them to fill it in? What would be more expected there?

The general principle here is that if your field has a placeholder which is descriptive such as "Enter search here" (or just "Search") then it's a bad user experience if submitting the form does a search for the literal text "Enter search here". However, if the placeholder is a valid example such as "Isaac Asimov", then it's a good user experience if submitting the form does a search for that actual text, especially where trying out the search is a primary means of demonstrating the product as is the case here.

Another example might be a flight search service where the placeholders for "Departing" and "Arriving" contain "Los Angeles" and "New York" plus valid leave/return dates. If you're trying to show people (who may not be actively looking for a flight at the time) how awesome your service is, clicking on the "Show Flights" button should use those values because the whole point is to demonstrate your service's unique selling proposition.

For a login/demo where your goal is to get people to try the demo and convert into a signup, I suspect you will find it more effective to offer trying a demo account via an obvious, in-your-face call to action rather than dual-purposing your customer login form.

Dual-purposing your customer login form in addition to the blatant CTA might not be a terrible idea, though.

Not to mention that you might be able to get a couple of dollars from whomever's name or title you put in there. That's a nice unobtrusive way to get some ad money.

Thanks. I fixed that for the moment by removing the placeholder. Will have to think of a better way of suggesting searches to users.

This may be a technical problem, but it's hard to really know the best price of a book when you exclude used books from third-party sellers. For example I found a $70 book that was in the $60 range on a foreign site, but then if you clicked through on the US site you could find one for $45 that was slightly used. Without that kind of contextual information the site is less useful.

It may be less useful for your particular case but I found it an amazing tool. I want new books and I didn't know that the German site had the book I was looking for in half the price although three weeks delivery at most.

I´ve been doing this manually for years, great job. Just include amazon.es please ;). It would be interesting to have the possibility to change the shipping option. Shipping from amazon.com with the cheapest option takes a month or more to reach Spain, so sometimes is better to pay a bit more to avoid that.

Nice! working on something similar but not limited to Amazon stores only http://www.librarist.com/

Well done.

I'm building something slightly similar : http://www.shoptimate.com But it's browser extension, not a website and it's not limited to books or Amazon.

Note that shipping from a foreign country can lead to custom taxes.

I tried it with the first several suggested books, and they all showed .com as the cheapest. You might want to consider hand-picking a few that will show up for [country] users as cheaper from [other country] store, to better demonstrate the utility of the service.

I typically use http://bigwords.com for multi-book price comparison; it gives you the cheapest total price with shipping, and allows you to tweak parameters (new/used, internation, etc).

It would be good to convert all prices to a single currency, I understand these change daily but I'm sure you could find a real time quote to track/use.

I like the design a lot, very clean. Hats off!

This is great! As someone who moved from London to Sydney it is just what I need, I never know whether to order from the .com store or the .co.uk store.

You might find http://booko.com.au/ useful

Hey that's my site - thanks for mentioning it! There's also a UK, NZ and US site( http://booko.us/ ) now.

Wow. Thanks for saving me umpteen bucks over the last few years.

Great, thanks! I shall bookmark that for later.

Clever idea, nice design and great service! What are the chances that you add Amazon.it as well?

It seems not to take ASIN numbers.

booko.com.au is a similar Australian site, although it doesn't limit itself to only Amazon.

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