zlert

KillerStartups reviewed zlert today. It's a great summary of what we are about. Well worth reading. Thanks to the folks at KillerStartups.

They did ask one question at the end under the "Some questions" section:

"Can’t you create most of these kinds of alerts on Amazon itself?"

The answer is no. Amazon are a great store, with an enormous range of products. You probably could spend your entire life only using products that you have ordered from Amazon (via zlert of course :)). They are not, though, a site for shopping alerts. The alerts they do offer are very limited, and you will have a hard time finding them.

There's a huge range of things that Amazon needs to do in order to run the kind of business that they do. They are not sitting around all day thinking about how they can make alerts more useful, what new kinds of alerts they could create etc. The kind of things we spend all day thinking about.

Besides, it's not really in their interest to encourage you to wait for an item's price to fall (e.g. with a price alert). Or to let you know when the price falls after you have bought it (with a price guarantee alert).

Other alerts we offer, I think would be good for Amazon to offer. For example, search alerts, accessory alerts etc. They don't, because I think they have other priorities, other things they want to grab your attention with.

It's one of the reasons they have made their data available to third-parties like us. We can add value doing things that they are not thinking about. It's mutualistic relationship. We both benefit.