Nice tool to compare prices between Amazon stores internationally

As someone spending a lot of time in Spain at the moment, whenever I make one of my frequent order to Amazon I must always play what I called “the shipping game”. That is, knowing that I’d order from Amazon, and knowing what I wanted to order, to go back and forth between the US and UK Amazon sites to see where I could get the books cheaper and faster!

Pricenoia takes this pain away by letting you do single searches across all Amazon stores, showing where the product is in stock, estimating the shipping to you wherever you are in the world, and even doing currency conversions to give you a clean comparison of which store is cheapest to order from.

Always great to see some technical innovation in Barcelona.

Some thoughts/feedback about improving the service:

  • Allow me to create a virtual shopping cart of products, to compare shipping when ordering say, 10 books and a DVD. This would fit the more common use-case: whenever I order internationally like that, I always bundle many products together to spread the cost of shipping.
  • When showing products in stock, would be interesting to know more detail– I would rather order from the shop that says, typical shipping in 24 hours than the one that says 1–2 weeks.
  • The price history graph is indeed interesting, but only when there’s enough data stored to make the graph– I would not show this graph if there’s less than like, 10 days data.
  • Would be interesting to tap into someone’s wish list, to find what product(s) they want, then do the Pricenoia search to figure out the best way to ship it to them.

Update: One final thought is that I've seen on many blogs published in countries with no Amazon store, or blogs published for an international audience, people signing up to be Amazon affiliates in all the stores. Whenever they talk about a book, they include links to Amazon US, UK, etc.

It would make sense for Pricenoia to create its own meta-affiliate program that encapsulates the multiple Amazon programs, and transfers commissions to its own affiliates while keeping a commission. The value for a blogger or etailer is only having to maintain a single affiliate login while still being able to earn commissions from all Amazon stores.

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