
Show HN: FiveStar.io – The best Amazon products, by budget - Shrugs
http://fivestar.io
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kevinastone
Each key press adds to the push state history. Spams the back button

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hglaser
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.

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booruguru
> 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.

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larrybolt
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?

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mrjatx
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).

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grimtrigger
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.

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0x420
An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please
try again in a few moments.

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Dimitris
yeap, got the same as well

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dm2
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.

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hxc
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.

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joshdance
What are some of the rules that people often violate?

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

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fallinghawks
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.

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general_failure
Nice idea.

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

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

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dang
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.

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ttttannenbaum
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.

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aw3c2
Doesn't matter, got your browser cookied with the affiliate program. ;)

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Tarrosion
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.

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

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Shrugs
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!

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Telomer
I've seen something like this before. [http://toppp.com/](http://toppp.com/)

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

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

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wging
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?

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

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

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Shrugs
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.

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thesimon
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.

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

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

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

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

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Shrugs
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!

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

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inetsee
It's still dead, Jim.

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DiabloD3
This is very useful. I hope Amazon doesn't try to C&D it.

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

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Shrugs
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!

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anoother
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).

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

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lazyant
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"

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jeffehobbs
Neat idea. But yeah, error.

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

