How to piss off Amazon!
I would say this isn’t the first time I would be annoying someone. The good news is that I am consistent and this time it’s David Vs Goliath! Ok truthfully I love Amazon, really I do!
Having an interest in retail I was curious to hear how this little website was performing and so with a little research I found out it was doing rather well indeed:
480 million products
$107 Billion Sales
230k employees
186m Visitors per month
Safe to say, it isn’t a book store any more. I started looking at the breadth of products and really was blown away. One of the areas I was interested in was camcorders. Looking online for depth of range I thought who would have as much? eBay was an obvious choice, but I cant trust eBay for new electronics. I had heard there was a little store in the US called Walmart.
To clarify I am joking when I say “little.”
Walmart has a bigger GDP than Norway, as many employees as the Chinese military and just about 85k people in logistics alone.
Criminally it does not have a huge influence online. However, they had around 96 cameras and when I did a quick check. Amazon on the other had had 2016 options.
By default I thought Amazon was the cheapest on everything until I started digging around. It turns out that there were areas where I could find a cheaper option somewhere else. For example things like electronics where the descriptions were the same, or the model number it was easier to compare. I started talking to a few friends regarding this and looking into if we could make a tool to find out if something was cheaper elsewhere!
So I am kind of excited to show you a very early version of the tool I developed. It is currently working on about 10% of the Amazon inventory so there is a lot of work to make it work with everything, but remember that first product I was looking at? It was a Canon Mark lll at almost £2700 and my tool found it for £750 cheaper with another retailer. See if you could save anything with the tool. Here it is in action:
Install the extension directly here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cheaperthanxyz/imcanfjmhejiiglknodcoapeppjodldh?utm_source=MediumP
Webpage is here:
A much more comprehensive explanation of how I made it and the details are here:
