How I created a tool to save you money on Amazon!
A quick intro into why I chose to make a new chrome extension www.cheaperthan.xyz to save people money on Amazon.
The Amazon logo has what looks like a smile on it but it is an arrow from A to Z! I am a huge fan of it. When I was at university I used it extensively for books. As a recovering shopaholic however, I have curbed my shopping a little. I started realising it was such a powerful retailer being online, cheaper and with so much choice. Anything I could think of and the first place I thought was Amazon.
Coming from a retail background I was naturally always reading about who was moving into what sector, who was innovating etc and Amazon was leading the race, except in size and dominance in the market. Walmart was still the largest behemoth of them all, but why in my mind did Amazon reign supreme?
Perhaps because Amazon had fulfilled my shopping on many an occasion from London to Manchester. Walmart? Not so much, at least not with that name but a more elusive Asda. The closest I got to actual Walmart was on TV. The prediction by industry insiders is that Walmart will be taken over in terms of size by Amazon by 2027 and I am counting down…
To give you an idea of what that actually means.
Amazon would need to employ more people than the Chinese military, its GDP would need to be bigger than that of Norway and its logistics team alone would need to have 85,000 employees…
That is of course if everything at Walmart were to remain the same. Yet last I read, Amazon were retailing around 480 million products in the US alone. I mean it is astonishing to think of the depth and breadth of their range.
I remember reading a case study by the financial company Wells Fargo. They compared two baskets from Amazon and Walmart. Firstly they found the basket even when factoring in shipping made the Amazon basket around 9% cheaper. More interestingly however, was the breadth of their range.
In the camcorder segment they found 96 cameras in Walmart, dwarfed by Amazon offering 2,016 options in the same category.
I started wondering if Amazon was on it’s way to being the largest retailer a lot sooner than people had predicted. Especially with prime now available in most major cities. Inspired by the camera story, I started looking for cameras on Amazon. I loved Canon and my favourite was a Canon 5D Mark III. I knew roughly this was a £2800 camera so was not surprised when I saw Amazon listing it for £2699. Not bad I thought “There must be something clinically wrong with me for thinking almost £3k for a camera was not bad!” Anyway, I decided to look at the different prices, maybe I should buy it second hand. It was then I noticed some retailers were selling them new on Amazon but a little lower than what Amazon had listed their new option at. Could it be true? Would it be possible to find others online, hidden from the mighty web of Amazon retailing at a lower cost? These sellers were well and truly caught in the web.
Later that evening I was on a quest. Could I find that camera for a lower cost than what I had found at Amazon… I looked and having ticked off the major retailers, John Lewis, PC World, Argos and a host of others I was not in luck. I searched google shopping too and then realised how much time it took to click and browse, the shipping costs etc etc. Until that is, I found a site online which was retailing it for around £420 cheaper than Amazon! Probably not real I thought. Upon closer inspection I realised they actually were retailing a brand new one for £420 lower. I started thinking about how if people looked a little harder they would realised that sometimes you may be able to find a great deal outside of Amazon. To give context to the situation my first DSLR was almost that amount!
I had done research like this with some high ticket luxury items but that is another story altogether. Speaking to my friends about the great deal I had found we started discussing the possibility of making something that would essentially do the searching but not as manually. I discussed it a few times until one of them pointed in the direction I should be looking at if I wanted to make it a reality. Not being a “Tech” person I thought how should I build this. It started by having some knowledge of the retail industry and this came from the magical SKU number that we speak of.
Most products tend to have a barcode or unique retail identifier. Maybe I should research how amazon actually list their products. It must be in categories and classes etc. I realised they had an Amazon Standard Identification Number or (ASIN) for short. This essentially was their unique identifier citing location, quanity, type and category of product. Naturally with more research I discovered a more sophisticated system for categorising items. The identifiers were part of a more global system called Global Trade Item Numbers or GTINs for short. It was by being able to look these up was one able to see what prices I could pull.
GTINs had a few options in them including things like ISBN, UPC and EAN. Each stood for something, UPC was Universal Product Code for instance and EAN was the European Article Number. Knowing the UK market well, this was an organic place to start the search. Having discussed and debated with a few tech friends I placed an add out to a few developers who would be able to pull data like this in. It was a struggle at first to find good developers but having the help of a few good developers also question them was a good thing to do. Slowly but surely I explained the concept and although I can use Photoshop to design, I was quick to imagine how it would look. Sadly such refined style was not the first step when working with a developer who has to do a lot more before making it look and function well. We worked on it for a few months slowly but surely moving forward with the project. I knew what I wanted it to do but getting someone else to do it was an interesting lesson to learn. I had worked with developers before and know the timeframes involved in making something new.
Lo and behold we got to a stage when he said I think its working. Excited I tried it out immediately to see if it would work and voila! It came back with something.
With some more work getting it working on more products I am excited to say that I want other people to use it and see what they think of it! Keep in mind its totally in Beta mode so you would be the first but what I can say is that the camera that initially started the whole conversation, I found again the other day and this time with my tool, I found it £750 cheaper! So… There you go. It kinda works. :D]
You can check it out here:
Website- www.cheaperthan.xyz
Chrome Extension- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cheaperthanxyz/imcanfjmhejiiglknodcoapeppjodldh?utm_source=Medium
