Show HN: Automated Discounts on Amazon | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Automated Discounts on Amazon

zincsave.com

43 pointsFriedPickles44 comments

Wait, so what kinds of savings are actually available on Amazon in the first place?

I mean, I order tons of stuff. How exactly is Zinc saving me money? The books I order don't seem to vary in price, ever, and I've never seen promo codes for them either. I don't want them picking a third-party seller instead of Amazon, due to quality issues I've had in the past. They say they're not applying the affiliates discount to their own orders.

So what exactly are all these mysterious discounts?

(Also, if the orders are actually being placed through their own account, how is tracking handled? Returns? Customer service in general?)

Also what I am wondering. Can't seem to find anything on the splash page...

I know my Discover card sometimes gives me 5% off from online purchases during a certain quarter or bigger discounts on particular things from Amazon if I go through their "Discover store". Maybe they have a bunch of these types of credit cards?

I'm not sure how returns would work in that situation though, I guess you have to return it through Zinc.

I noticed (coincidentally) that the savings was close to the taxes -- I wonder if they are shipping to tax-free places and rerouting them somehow with a deal with a shipping company?

Even if the price of the item doesn't vary and there are no coupons, we can still save money using the most advantageous credit card rewards program.

If the original user sourced from a 3p vendor, we will sometimes source from an equal or higher rated vendor with an item in equal or better condition. One thing that most Amazon users miss is that the location of the Amazon vendor relative to their shipping address can affect their final pricing due to sales tax.

There are cases where we cannot save as much as we promised, in which case we take the loss.

Heavy Amazon user here (for 99% of my non-fresh food purchases, I order it on Amazon). This looks neat at first glance, because I order things on Amazon all the time, and I like saving money. A few things that prevent me from using it right now:

- Trust. Is this service legal? Will Amazon get upset at me for using it? Maybe I'm worrying for nothing, but addressing those questions directly on your website would be worthy.

- Order history. Using Zinc means orders won't show up in my Amazon order history, right? I like having all my Amazon orders tied to my Amazon account.

- No one click purchase integration. I haven't used Amazon's "shopping cart" flow in forever.

Thanks for the feedback! We're hoping to make the extension work for one-click users soon.

Establishing trust is a big challenge for us. The best we know to do is provide an amazing experience for each order we get, and hope that trust in our service spreads through word of mouth.

What if I need to make a return on an item? How does that work?

We provide a consistent interface for returns through our order dashboard. You simply request a return, and we provide you with a prepaid mailing label to return the item to the retailer.

When the item has been delivered, we refund your card with a full refund.

Mind if I drop you an email? I have a couple of questions re: the extension.

Based on their FAQ, they act as a proxy, in which you pay them to order goods from Amazon. And you will use this proxy because they will do the heavy work of finding the lowest price for you.

If anything, Amazon will punish Zinc rather than the receiver of the goods.

So I'm confused here, you're saying that the products are still ordered through Amazon? Where are the promo codes from?

Yes, our API (more info at zinc.io) places the order on the user's behalf, applying any promo codes, using the best rewards offers, etc. We guarantee the savings.

Does Zinc simply kickback some affiliate revenue earned?

We do not use Amazon Associates (the affiliate program) in any manner. Sometimes the API finds savings beyond what we've guaranteed, which is how we make money.

"We use a number of strategies to maximize savings, including discount codes, optimized credit card rewards, and strategic order timing. You can expect to save between $1 and $5 on most orders, and even more for large orders!" [1]

[1] https://www.zincsave.com/faq

I... can't see how this is legal. If I were Amazon and I heard about this, you'd have a cease and desist order at your doorstep the next day...

If this is legal, though, please do explain.

Would it be illegal if you wanted to buy something and instead of ordering it directly by yourself you asked a friend who is an experienced shopper to order it for you? This friend just happens to have "The Price Is Right" style knowledge of the price of items, and he knows all the best coupon codes and deals that can be applied for a particular product so that you spend the least amount of money.

Zinc Save is a browser extension that acts like that friend. From what I see it isn't doing anything that a real human can't do by themselves (comparing prices on different websites and looking up coupon codes) but it just automates the process to make it easier for you.

Actually, it is doing something illegal. It's injecting a button on Amazon.com's webpage (without their consent) trying to swoop your business from them by offering a slightly lower price.

The more equivalent analogy is, you're shopping at a store and right as you're in the checkout line, a guy runs in the store from outside and steps in front of the cashier with an ipad and a Square credit card scanner and says he'll go get the exact same items from somewhere else and bring them right to your car for less than what you're about to pay for all the things in your cart. Don't you think the store would get a little pissed about that?

A browser user agent is not a promise to view a page in a certain way. The user is consenting to the button when they install the add on.

It's non-obvious how injecting a button through a browser plugin would be illegal. I've never heard of a plugin author being sued for doing something like that, and there are thousands of plugins that inject content into or change the content of commercial sites you're viewing.

Your browser is a piece of software that is not obligated to display an HTML page exactly as the server delivers it. If you want to enhance your browser to add extra features and functionality to pages there is nothing wrong with that.

What makes your example illegal is that the person is advertising their service to customers without the customer's permission, just going up to them in the store and spamming them. Additionally store management can rightfully ask the theoretical interceptor to leave the premises and stay out.

With Zinc Save the customer chooses to install the browser extension and ask for Zinc's help to find the best deals. Additionally no web store can justly make demands that customer's browsers display the store without modifications. If the customer chooses to install an extension that adds extra functionality to the store pages then that is the customer's choice. Zinc Save doesn't need Amazon's consent to inject a button, they just need the consent of the customer with the browser, and that consent is granted when the customer installs the add on.

Ok, let's modify my example from "some guy" to "some guy you know" and imagine that a lot of people know this guy, and he's always standing outside that store. The store would get mad for sure.

Don't get me wrong here, I would happily use any service that would save me money if I didn't believe it was a bit shady. I'm just kind of foreseeing a bit of a legal issue if this somehow took off and got on Amazon's radar and their sales started noticeably dropping.

If legal action could NOT be pursued, it would be easy for Amazon to update their code to prevent any sort of injection like this, and it would turn into a cat-and-mouse game of who could update their code more quickly:

    setInterval(function() {
        var button = document.getElementById('zincbutton'); //or whatever
        button && button.remove();
    }, 100);

From what they describe on their FAQ page they just use crafty ordering techniques and deals to save you money. They aren't necessarily parasitizing sales from Amazon and sending them elsewhere, they are just taking advantage of savings techniques and coupons that already exist.

It's like meeting up with your friend outside the store to go shopping, and he has a big binder full of coupons that he's cut out of newspapers and circulars, and he has a credit card that he uses when checking out that has a nice rewards bonus. He uses his coupons and reward bonus to save you money and pass the savings back to you. In return he keeps a portion of the savings. So Amazon might not have that big of an axe to grind with them because its not really hurting them that much.

But I totally agree about the cat and mouse issue. I don't think this company has a very solid business model, because if history shows anything its that these kind of browser extensions require constant updating to keep them operational, especially if the website is actively trying to block them by changing the DOM, JS, etc. The ongoing development and maintenance costs of keeping this extension operational are going to severely eat into any minor profits that they make, especially if Amazon closes or limits some of the savings exploits / coupons that they are using currently.

Still I wish them the best of luck in their venture. I'm sure it will be a fun and interesting project for their devs, and if they succeed at becoming profitable all the better.

I understand the analogy here. But how will it gurantee shipping at a speed equal to a prime member. Do they have a pool of free prime accounts that they will use to order your items or they have tie-ups with FedEx/UPS ?

You could increase your potential user base by 50% by adding firefox support

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

seems to indicate firefox has about half the usage of chrome.

From the numbers of my extension, Chrome users are more keen to install extensions. I believe that it's mainly because the Chrome Webstore makes it easier to find extension than Mozilla's.

You know your own numbers better than I do.

I just want FF to get some love.

I use Amazon. I found Zinc here yesterday. I rolled the dice, ordered ~$100. My CC gives 5% cashback on amazon, 1% normally. The Zinc advantage over the 4% difference was slim, but I'd rather someone else use my points than me. In fact I'd rather take the cash benefit right now, before I even spend the money.

Anyhow, I'm posting now because I just got half the order, sitting at my door when I got off work. It was delivered in probably 16~20 hours. I don't have Prime. This is amazing. It's about Zappos-level impressive from a customer standpoint.

Is the user making a purchase from ZincSave (are you becoming the merchant?) or do you passthrough the user's credit card information to order on Amazon?

Interesting model given how often Amazon marks up/down prices to arbitrage if you believe you can buy at a lower price within a reasonable amount of time. Case in point, I had added a carbon steel frying pan to my cart for $26.97 on sale and then a day later, it jumped back to $38 and I didn't want to buy it anymore.

Interesting idea, how does this work for international orders? Do I get the product price discounted, and then pay whatever Amazon lists for shipping?

This isn't immediately clear due to Amazon's price conversion. Here's what I see when I head to checkout: http://i.imgur.com/2ruNHfr.png

Which matches up with product price + shipping if I swap back to USD: http://i.imgur.com/ekeMX0y.png

But I'm still unclear how Zinc works with international shipping as the discounted price includes both product price and shipping.

Interesting. I swear I recently had an idea of creating a chrome extension which will give me an alert every time I am on a checkout page of some site/product and tell me if I could save more due to coupons etc. that I am not aware of for that particular item. So before I click on "Purchase", I will get a small popup that says "You are paying x for this item but you can only pay x-y if you use this abc coupon". This seems similar even though it goes the extra step of ordering on your behalf.

Well if you are in UK you can use Quidco and their extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quidco-cashback-re...

Which tells you if the site you are visiting offers a cashback through them (supposedly, the reviews are not very positive).

There's a Chrome extension called Honey (I believe one of the devs posts here occasionally) which does this (well, you click a button and it tries a bunch of codes for you, it doesn't tell you upfront you can save).

so you're like a combination of honey + intercepting and storing my order information on your servers to wrap around canceling and returning?

That's fairly accurate. We're adding support for more retailers rapidly, and the ability to see and manage orders from across the internet from a unified place (the Zinc Save dashboard) is part of our value proposition.

If you place an order with a retailer we support, you don't need to dig around their website to figure out how to cancel it. We provide a consistent interface.

Actually it seems they place the order for you, i.e. not using your Amazon account at all. In other words it's a proxy service, except instead of paying a fee for the proxy, you actually pay less, and they make up the difference through optimized ordering habits. Very interesting.

As you only offer discounts on Amazon and Walmart can your chrome extension please just request data from those domains and not ‘all websites’? I'm very conscious of extension over-access.

We request permission for all websites since we are rapidly adding support for more retailers. We don't want to have to ask the user for new permissions every time we add a retailer.

This saved me 10% on a few books I just bought, so it clearly seems to work. I'd definitely like to know how though.

Do the orders show up in your amazon history? If not, is there some way to access them? Their website is a bit sparse on details.

I'm guessing they have some way to provide discounts on all orders (credit card savings or something), and are able to sometimes get an additional discount using coupons.

This possibly refunds buyers part of the Amazon affiliate fees they get for intercepting the order. I don't think Amazon will appreciate that... There are other "cashback" type services like this though, e.g. http://www.quidco.com/ which actually has contracts with many merchants (who appreciate it).

According to "FriedPickles" farther down the comment thread:

    We do not use Amazon Associates (the affiliate program) in any manner.
    Sometimes the API finds savings beyond what we've guaranteed,
    which is how we make money.

dont not work for me. I tried amazon am walmart

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