PriceProtectr.com helps you save money AFTER the purchase
By Jason Sherrill
Posted on May 28, 2007
I purchased a book from Amazon.com two weeks ago. I read it, liked it and bought several additional copies to give to friends. Last week, Amazon dropped the price $3.00. Thanks to www.priceprotectr.com, I learned about the price drop and was able to get my $9.00 credit using Amazon's Price Protection guarantee.
PriceProtectr.com is a nifty service that helps you take advantage of price protection guarantees from about 30 online retailers, like Amazon.com and Target.com. To use the service, you simply paste a link to the product you purchased, enter the price you paid (if it's different from the price that priceprotectr.com retrieves) and then add your email address. If the price changes within 30 days, PriceProtectr.com will email you so that you can contact the store to get your price difference refund.
From a development perspective, the site usability is an 8/10; my only complaint is that "buttons" don't have a clickable look, nor does your mouse pointer change to a hand when you hover over them. They've demonstrated the usefulness of AJAX nicely in their "protect a product" form. I also give them double kudos for not requiring a lengthy sign-up process...in fact, there is no sign-up process at all! Of course, I suspect that as evil bots learn about the site, they'll have to implement a Turing number or some other CAPTCHA method to prevent form spamming.
By the way, the book was The Dip.