

Show HN: Find the cheapest Amazon for your books - k33l0r
http://piranhas.co/

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helen842000
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.

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fxthea
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."

~~~
k33l0r
Thanks for that, I paraphrased your suggestion almost directly to the site.
The change will be online soonish.

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biot

      "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.

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derefr
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?

~~~
biot
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.

~~~
plorkyeran
Dual-purposing your customer login form _in addition_ to the blatant CTA might
not be a terrible idea, though.

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hh22
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.

~~~
aeurielesn
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.

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omegant
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.

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35pr17
Nice! working on something similar but not limited to Amazon stores only
<http://www.librarist.com/>

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patd
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.

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tnorthcutt
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.

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wingspan
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).

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jayshahtx
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!

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joepour
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.

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nubbie
You might find <http://booko.com.au/> useful

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

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

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

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bonchibuji
It seems not to take ASIN numbers.

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

