It’s really going to get exciting as entrepreneurs start to develop more web applications from APIs and the data made available by larger companies. I’m seeing more of it every day, and the latest example reported on by MediaPost is AmazonCreditsYou.com.
It’s a service that allows you enter your email address and the product number of whatever you buy from Amazon in case they lower the prices. Amazon has a policy that if they lower the prices within 30 days, you can get difference back if you submit a request.
Before this service, I doubt many people took advantage of this, but now with a tie-in to the Amazon API and a bit of front-end coding, you can now get notified via email if you’re eligible for a refund on a price drop. That’s pretty handy.
Will this eventually make Amazon change it’s policy as more and more consumers use this? Or will it help Amazon be the store of choice over other merchants because you know if you buy there now, you won’t lose out on a sale or price drop? I’d say right now it’s giving me another reason to shop at Amazon.
As far as AmazonCreditsYou.com itself, I’m not a huge fan of the domain name due to it locking them in to being just about Amazon in case other merchants opened up APIs to do the same.
It looks like their business model is Adsense revenue and being an Amazon affiliate. I hope there’s more there for them at some point, but maybe that’s enough for the amount of work involved in creating the service. Definitely a good service, I’m sure many in the web shopping world will enjoy it.
Thanks for the write up!
We(amazoncreditsyou) have moved to a domain more friendly to adding other retailers.
Our new home is: http://www.refundplease.com