Beat Amazon.com price differences with Pricenoia

WRITING ABOUT web sites is always difficult. The web is an evolving landscape and new sites come and go all the time, and people tend to focus on web sites they already know. So, under the risk of receiving a flood of messages telling me "ha!, old news, buddy!" here's an introduction to a web site I didn't discover until a couple months ago, and which I never saw mentioned on the INQ: it's called "Pricenoia" (.com) and basically it lets you compare prices for books and DVDs on the different branches of the online retail Amazon.com (Amazon.com U.S., Amazon.ca, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de etcetera) including shipping to your home country.

Believe it or not, you will find out that buying goods from the "nearest" (or your own country's) Amazon.com branch is not always the cheapest. Currency fluctuations, different shipping rates, and different merchandise stock levels at the different branches can result in savings when ordering from the most unexpected places. For instance, at the time I took the screenshots I was able to find that a certain book covering the "SIP" voice-over-ip protocol was about $11 greenbacks cheaper if bought from Amazon Blighty and shipped to Argentina compared to ordering the same item from the U.S. site.

The idea is simple: you enter a book, cd, dvd, or game title into the site's search box, and you get the price - with shipping costs to your destination country- added in. Further clicking lets you see a plotted "history graph" of the price changes for that particular item on all the referenced Amazon stores.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here's a few pictures:

Surprise: a certain book delivered to Argentina is cheaper if ordered from Amazon Bligthy

A book delivered to Austria is cheaper bought from Amazon Germany

Another book sent to Blighty is cheaper if bought from the U.S.

A DVD disc sent to Israel is cheaper if ordered from Canada

A book sent to Sweden is cheaper if bought from France

The pictured examples are for reference only, but it gives you an idea of the kind of surprises you can get. So, next time you plan to use Amazon.com to purchase books or dvds, you might give Pricenoia a try and beat the currency fluctuations and the different pricing schemes. Happy money saving!. µ

See also:

Amazon.com intros Lower Price Alerts shock
Amazon.com prices only "guaranteed for one hour" shock