
Show HN: Automated Discounts on Amazon - FriedPickles
https://www.zincsave.com
======
crazygringo
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?)

~~~
wavesounds
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.

------
GuiA
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.

~~~
FriedPickles
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.

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

~~~
FriedPickles
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.

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

~~~
FriedPickles
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.

~~~
fatbat
Does Zinc simply kickback some affiliate revenue earned?

~~~
FriedPickles
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.

------
ultimatedelman
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.

~~~
NathanKP
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.

~~~
ultimatedelman
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?

~~~
NathanKP
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.

~~~
ultimatedelman
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);

~~~
NathanKP
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.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers)

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

~~~
patd
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.

~~~
hayksaakian
You know your own numbers better than I do.

I just want FF to get some love.

------
arh68
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.

------
calbear81
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.

------
joshschreuder
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](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](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.

------
codegeek
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.

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

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quidco-cashback-
re...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quidco-cashback-
reminder/elfdpdgmnodokhbiabbcjabmhpdajcog)

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

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

~~~
FriedPickles
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.

------
jordn
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.

~~~
mkx
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.

------
SatvikBeri
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.

~~~
xur17
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.

------
lazyjones
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/](http://www.quidco.com/) which actually has contracts
with many merchants (who appreciate it).

~~~
NathanKP
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.

------
sapmittal
dont not work for me. I tried amazon am walmart

