Need a service which can help you buy a book at the lowest price?
Try out BooksPrice.
BooksPrice.com offers a twist on the standard price comparison services. While other price comparisons used to compare a single price at a time, BooksPrice offered a way to compare the complete content of a cart (Including books, dvds, cds and video games).
One of the most significant feature of BooksPrice is RSS Price Watcher.
“RSS Price Watcher” adds a twist to the standard way in which users usually use RSS feeds. Our customizable RSS feeds enable users to track the price of a specific book, dvd, cd or a video game using rss feeds on any RSS reader – for example, from their own personalized portals and home pages (in sites like Google, Yahoo, NetVibes and others). This makes Price Comparison an easy and an hassle free tool, and makes it easy for them to watch for price drops on their desired items. The feeds can be customizable by: shipping location, currency, and filtering on new or used items.
Very interesting service. And the best part about BooksPrice is that it’s not just limited to particular geographies [search is spread across multiple geographies].
The site is pretty well AJAXed and RSS Watcher is probably the smartest feature that these guys have built [I have always believed that an offline presence always boosts a brand value].
Compare this with uGenie. And you will know where online retail is headed to! – i.e. scraping and product/item/SKU bundling!
By the way, a price comparison of Harry Potter 7 [pre-order] resulted in a better offer from uGenie! [$18.84 vs. BooksPrice's $38.84!]
Hi there!
This is Lucy from Booksprice. I am so glad you try our site. Thank you for your excellent review.
Regarding the Harry Potter comparison, the prices you saw at our site refer to the ‘Delux edition’. the book with the ISBN 0545010225 is the hardcover format and has a lowest price of $17.87 also at BooksPrice while the ISBN 0545029376 is the Deluxe Edition, which has an higher price.
The best way to compare a book is by its ISBN. While books may share titles, authors, publisher etc the ISBN is always unique and reflects a difference in the content or edition and in most of the cases in the price.
We did notice that some of the searches for Harry Potter were leading to the ‘deluxe edition’, and now we made them return the standard edition.
A feature that can help here is the ‘other formats’ link –which appears together with the book’s description-that makes it easier for the users to compare different formats or editions.
Thanks Lucy for the clarification. From an end user perspective, it’s not at all feasible to know/remember the ISBN numbers!!
And that’s a challenge for you guys as well. i.e. hide these complex details and provide a clean UI!!
-Ashish