Derek good point, but any paper towel you buy is transported somehow. Wether it is transported to a supermarket, then transported back to your home via your car or transported via UPS to your doorstep, it requires fossil fuel to get on your counter. I guess it comes down to what is the 'greener' choice...driving to a store or having UPS/Fedex deliver items to you. I have no idea what the cleaner option is, but if I can avoid driving to the store, I do...

ericshmerick

@Derek: How is that any worse than buying them at the store? The stuff has to get shipped from the port/factory to my house one way or the other. I always wind up reusing the boxes and packing material, too, I may add.

Erwos

So the day after Earth Day we're encouraging people to mail order their paper towels and diapers? Those items in particular cause enough waste. Do we really need to have them shipped halfway across the country to us in a box that will, no doubt, be packed with those silly plastic air packages (as if the paper towels will break without packing material.

Derek

@Panhandler: That kinda kicks ass. I thought I was the only person who did that.

hammerimissu

What they forgot to mention about the paper towels is that they are made by a company called Seventh Generation, which makes them from "100% recycled paper (minimum 80-percent post-consumer) and is whitened via environmentally-safe process and safe for composting". Same thing applies for their toilet paper. This company tries to make all their products from natural materials which "Saves natural resources and reduces pollution."

Senshi

Don't forget that coin star machines give you amazon gift certificates with NO FEE. You can some times buy these from people who don't want them, or other amazon gift certificates at a discount. This site organizes discount amazon gift certificates from ebay as well as other discount gift cards.

If you are buying a gift card on eBay, PLEASE read the ebay gift card scam tips to save yourself some head aches.

jonathanl

this may not be quite on target, but I sometimes find books on Amazon that I want to read, but maybe just get from the library instead of buy from Amazon. Using this site as a guide, I built a bookmarket for the Leon County library, so when I'm on a book's page, I click my bookmark and a window from the library pops up letting me know if they have the book. If they do, it's a two-click process to reserve the book. When they email me that it's arrived, I walk over during lunch and get my book.

Panhandler

Jungle Crazy have been well and truly sunk. Even when their web server can cope with a connection, the db server fails, badly. Unfortunate, as I thought it was the best looking link on there.

braklet

Looks like you slashdotted Jungle Crazy. The site now says "This site has temporarily exceeded its connection limit. Please try again in a few minutes." Oops. :-)

Apel Mjausson

RefundPlease looks great. Anyone know of something like that which will work with Amazon.co.uk?

Onouris

@Erwos: Instead of arriving in 100's of different shipments to your hundreds of neighbors it comes on one truck to the few stores in your neighborhood, packed in much larger containers. Clearly, neither method is ideal, but it seems obvious to me that more individual shipments are worse than 1 large shipment.

Reusing the packing materials is great. It puts you well ahead of the norm, I would suspect. Still, there are some things Amazon is good for, and others it's not. I happen to think this is one of the things it's not good for.

Derek

@Derek:

I don't think Lifehacker is condoning the reckless use of paper and plastic goods either. Those were just examples of items that might need periodic re-refilling.

I second Erwos on that transportation costs are not mitigated by buying your groceries at the store, rather than having them delivered. If anything they are magnified. The delivery truck leaves once and hits all the deliveries sequentially. Each shopper, drives a separate car all the way top the store an back, in addition to the transportation to the store from the point of manufacture.

Woody Schneider

Sigh... most of this was US Only

Binks

I use Price Protectr instead of RefundPlease to keep track of my purchases and get refunds, you can read more about it on their site: [www.priceprotectr.com] I really like it because it has a FireFox add-on that let's me right click on the product page, choose Price Protect and it will fill in the form for me and I simply need to select Start Protecting and it's done. No need to go to the website each time to enter the information. I know I might sound like an ad for the service, but it's great and easy and so far I've gotten back $121.25 using it. It has a nice "My Stuff" section that keeps track of all of your purchases and shows you graphs of price drops and how much you've saved total. I know it also works on Amazon.co.uk and have received refunds from there as well.

You can set it up to email you when the price drops based upon your preference (ie don't email me if the price drop is less that fifty cents) and each time there is a price drop, you will get an email with instruction on how to submit your claim to Amazon.

Anyway, enough with the ad, use it and love it.

Icayrus

@Binks: BuyLater works in US, Canada, UK and Germany. France and Japan will be coming soon as well.

Oh, and I finally bought a domain name:

[www.buylatr.com]

Might be easier to remember than the other one.

JoshuaMcKenty

@Binks: The secret Amazon Discounts works in the US, Canada, UK, Germany and France.

jonathanl

@Binks: Secret Amazon Discounts is US, Canada, UK, France, Germany.

jonathanl

Jangle.net is a great place to Amazon power shop.

The site is super simple to use. Shoppers can sort any number of categories by discount amount, customer rating, lowest price, and most popular products.

Shoppers can even see if Amazon products rate as best, better or good buys. Jangle's best buys are Amazon products that are have high customer reviews, are discounted and/or low priced, and are popular with consumers.

Check it out! [www.jangle.net]

jdan57

Yeah, 'cept did you know that Amazon is proud to sell dog-fighting how-to books and magazines, but refuses to sell what they consider porn?
Another example of sex being dirty but bloody violence being okay.
Wow, I sounded totes militant there.

Hollene

They also have an iPhone/iPod touch version of their site now. On Joy!

ph15h needs followers

The half dozen products I checked at "subscribe and save" were all considerably more expensive than buying the exact same thing at Costco (like the Scott toilet paper for example is 25% cheaper if I just buy it at Costco than if I were to 'subscribe and save'). For the cereals the bulk price is more than just buying the retail boxes at my grocery store.

Though I've never found Amazon to have particularly good prices outside of books anyway.

revmatty

You should also try PriceDrop @ [pricedrop.stuffstuff.org]
It's a Firefox extension which tracks Amazon prices - no registration or signup needed. It works with all Amazon shops - US, UK and more...

It was mentioned by LH @ [lifehacker.com]

liorn

!pinx is my favorite that i heard about on LH a few months ago. It keeps track of an item's price and emails you when it drops. The best part i like about it is that it works with the "used" prices in the amazon market place as well.

They need to add a few key features to make it really powerful, but its new and still in beta, i see lots of potential.

www.pinx.com

PiNPOiNT

Amazon Prime is an amazing deal. One aspect of it is a kind of locked-in, prepaid shipping for a year. If they don't offer it through Prime, I do not purchase (with a few rare exceptions).

Amazon shipping cartons and packaging are of better than average quality and I keep finding new ways to re-use and recycle.

Better to have items shipped than shop and lug. Since I went car-less, I couldn't be happier and, even where I do incur a shipping charge, it still, overall, costs less than the cost of owning, feeding, maintaining, and insuring a car.

Over the years I have found Amazon to be one of the few true customer oriented companies. That could change, of course, but they actually do listen and take care of business with integrity.

elanne

We live in a rural part of Oregon so a trip to Costco is a major undertaking. UPS delivers to our door and Post Office so the Subscribe and Save is a great option for us. We save considerable $$ on our orders especially given gas prices nowadays.

Lynnie

Ditto on using Subscribe-and-Save--for pretty much anything. During March, they had a great deal on coffee pods--they were cheaper per pack than they were in any local store, shipping was free, and I didn't have to pay sales tax.

MsFeasance

Waitable, at [www.waitable.com] lets you make a smart wishlist with items from both Amazon.com or over 88,000 other retailers. When your item drops to or below the price you set, you're emailed, you receive an update in your RSS feed, and optionally you get an SMS. It works great on mobile phones as well, so you can put in the UPC of a product while you're out shopping and get the lowest prices on an item, with links to buy. Within a few weeks, we'll be rolling out a feature that continues watching the product for price drops after the sale, and we've even got a bookmarklet. Give Waitable a shot if you get a chance. No user account is required.

richard

[onlinepricealert.com] is a just-launched Amazon price alert service.

Unlike some of the other services, you can track used prices as well as new prices, and you can set a different price target for used (or refurbished) than for new.

It doesn't require any kind of registration, and there's a bookmarklet that makes adding a new alert as easy as two mouse clicks while you're browsing the Amazon item you're interested in.

Check it out. Feedback is much appreciated.

calvins

I think Amazon's Subscribe & Save is great. Sure some things may be more expensive than Costco, but I have found several items that are cheaper this way, and you can't beat the convenience. (I hate going to Costco, there is always at least a 30 minute wait in line).

There is a Web site that lets you search the Subscribe & Save items (plus you can search the 4 for 3 promo,free shipping, etc) it is [www.product-place.net] .

I particularly like the capability to search the 4 for 3 promo!

jmorty732

How could you forget the most important amazon deals site?

[www.brand-name-coupons.com]

jefry

I can't believe no one's mentioned Book Burro. It's a Greasemonkey script that, when viewing books on Amazon, shows the price of books on other websites.

plasticjesus

Book burro ROCKS, but it's been an extension for a long time (much more powerful than the greasemonkey script). But I have to agree with the article, since it's specific only to BOOKS, it doesn't make my powerlist. Even though the developer is a friend of mine (sorry, Jesse.)

JoshuaMcKenty

@Derek: The thing is those hundreds of shipments come on trucks that are probably going to be on your street anyway. I used to work at UPS and these things are shipped in 53 foot trucks to distribution points all around the country. Chances are you getting in your car and driving to your nearest store uses more fuel than the truck stopping by your house. Often all it would entail is stopping to deliver the package as opposed to driving out of their normal route.

Paul_Eck

i believe amazon for shopping online . No other website gives as much as security to the netizens.
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gsvvmail

The service that I use is mylistwatcher.com. It monitors my amazon wish list and allows me to set a target price for each item and alerts me when that item drop below my target price. They also have an RSS Feed. It's been great!! I never miss a bargain now!!

sean588