Show HN: FiveStar.io – The best Amazon products, by budget | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: FiveStar.io – The best Amazon products, by budget

fivestar.io

75 pointsShrugs46 comments

Each key press adds to the push state history. Spams the back button

This needs to be removed. This messes up my history.

Is this really the top comment on this thread? And I thought HN had come so far.

This is an amazing website! Kudos to the creator(s).

It's exactly the way I wish I could browse Amazon, and since it's currently swallowing the HN firehose, I'm impressed that it's up and working. Given that it's so useful I will actually use it for shopping from now on, I feel like we can definitely cut it some slack on its day-one execution.

> Is this really the top comment on this thread? And I thought HN had come so far.

I don't understand what that means. The back button issue is a serious glitch, hence the upvotes.

I've added a debounce to that portion; sorry for the poor UX!

Any chance you could make an option to choose which amazon to search (amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de), I figure the API's will be the same anyway?

A few ideas;

Post the ratings. Post the ratings ratios (4-5 vs 1). Post the top 5 per budget. Grab user photos/videos and let the user click through them on the product image. Interface with the amazon API for pricing trends (like camelcamelcamel).

Amazon's API doesn't let you access the ratings as a number. You get an iframe to their reviews page. Its a total pain.

You could scrape the ratings. But being on Amazon's naughty list is a bad idea for any affiliate.

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

same here

yeap, got the same as well

Can you add some more filters?

I strongly prefer to purchase items that are either sold directly from Amazon or "Fulfilled by Amazon" items if at all possible. Part of the reason is that it seems like my name and address (and possibly other account information) would be sent to the seller when ordering by other methods, I'd like to limit this as much as possible.

Very nice way to make some side cash by using amazon affiliate network. Just make sure you are following their rules to a T so you do not get the hammer and actually get paid.

I like the clean look and the blue load bar. I also like the results.

What are some of the rules that people often violate?

I dont get it... doesn't amazon already have searching by price/rating?

Amazon does, but I find their results rather wonky at times. Filtering by rating works fine, but sorting on price seems to rarely work right -- they are often way out of order. Also filtering on price doesn't seem to work very well either.

On this, I would guess the price range categorization makes that more absolute. I would play with it more but I don't really have time right now.

Nice idea.

I get "Well, this is taking longer than usual...". Nothing loads.

In tools & home, a search for ryobi or milwaukee yields results 1/2 full of DeWalt tools. Just as I suspected.

This post got a lot of flags. Is that because the site was down? It's back up now, so I turned off the flags.

Some or all of the item prices seem to be based on the lowest "Used" price. This is not always ideal -- I am not about to buy a bookcase normally around $50 from the one seller that has it at $12. Being able to exclude used prices would be great.

Otherwise great UI and idea.

Doesn't matter, got your browser cookied with the affiliate program. ;)

I searched for "waffle iron" and "tennis racket" and thought the results were pretty spiffy looking.

But I'm a little unclear on the use case for this site. Say I want to buy a waffle iron, so I search for that term and get a list of results. How do I know which one to pick? If

a) I had a hard maximum budget b) I wanted to get the absolute best product possible in this budget (rather than say best value possible subject to price within budget) c) When x < y, the best product at $x is always inferior to the best product at $y

then I could just look for the price category just below my budget and pick one of the items there. But none of these assumptions are guaranteed to hold; in fact, in my experience generally all three do not.

Cool idea. Can you elaborate on how this improves on just searching amazon directly with filters on price and star rating?

You don't have to manually parse ratings and reviews. It just removes a few steps from the "I want an item, which one do I get" flow.

Thanks for checking it out!

I've seen something like this before. http://toppp.com/

Very neat idea. I added your site to my bookmarks.

But you need a new logo--something that looks more solid, polished, and professional.

FYI, your URLs seem to be encoded incorrectly (perhaps missing a decodeURIComponent somewhere, or incorrectly calling encodeURIComponent). Are you sure Amazon pays when it's in that format?

Thanks for pointing that out; I can't imagine they do. I've fixed the issue, thanks again!

Searched for 'router' and it recommended the MediaLink one. Noticed MediaBridge is back in business on Amazon? Guess that ban was short-lived =(

OP here: I switched the debounce to 1 second instead of 500ms, so that should fix a bit of the load problems.

I'll also scale the heroku dynos if it goes down again.

It seems to do a search requests instantly after you type a key (ie. in the middle of entering a word). Not surprised this has load issues.

Fantastic experience using this site! I love seeing what $50 extra bucks gives me and I more often than not splurge the little extra.

The results page consistently use "availible" instead of "available" which was a little jarring.

This is really nice. Any chance of making it work for other Amazon sites (regions) than .com?

This is really cool! does mess up the history though. Every URL gets saved to history.

I've fixed this with a decent debounce delay. I failed to test the back button, hence the poor UX.

Thanks for checkout it out!

For my search, it shows 6 'availible' items. Spell check time?

It's still dead, Jim.

This is very useful. I hope Amazon doesn't try to C&D it.

nice, great idea. Will you be adding different Amazons, I live in the UK and products differ/may not be available here.

It's certainly in the list of things to add, but I'm not confident enough in my backend code to add more complexity just yet. FiveStar will be undergoing a rewrite in August, so I could definitely add it then. Thanks for the feedback!

I don't know if you'll see this, as the thread is pretty old now.

You've at least 3 comments in this thread asking for the same thing. There's an enthusiasm about your product right now. That could be long gone by August.

If I were you, I'd find a way to implement the features being most often requested, sooner rather than later.

Apologies for my tone. I just really like the product and would like to see it succeed (and, yes, be more useful to me personally).

How does a dead link have 12 votes? Curious...

it was probably the other way around: it got votes and into the first page and because of that and the traffic it got "HN'ed"

Neat idea. But yeah, error.

Seems nice. I wanted to just see the best products by category, but it wouldn't let me search for [blank].

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