zlert

Zlert to close on August 31st

2011-08-21T18:59:00.002-04:00

As you may be aware, Amazon.com has been in dispute with several state governments here in the United States, over the collection of taxes. In many states, Amazon, because it has no physical presence, does not pay local taxes on items it sells to residents.

Several state governments, in order to get around this legal restriction, have passed laws treating Amazon affialites as an Amazon "physical presence". Amazon, in response, has simply withdrawn recognition of those affiliates in states that have passed such laws.

As you may be aware, Amazon.com has been in dispute with several state governments here in the United States, over the collection of taxes. In many states, Amazon, because it has no physical presence, does not pay local taxes on items it sells to residents.

Several state governments, in order to get around this legal restriction, have passed laws treating Amazon affiliates as an Amazon "physical presence". Amazon, in response, has simply withdrawn recognition of those affiliates in states that have passed such laws.

Zlert is an affiliate located in one of these states. As a result, Amazon.com withdrew their recognition of our site as an affiliate several months ago. What that means to us is that we no longer receive any commission from Amazon.com for items you purchase via our site. That, unfortunately has put a severe dent in our income.

Zlert does not make any profit, we breakeven at best. We have been operating at a loss for the past few months. With no resolution to the dispute between Amazon.com and the states, it's simply not possible for us to continue.

The site will therefore close on August 31st. All alerts will stop from that date also.

We would like to thank you all for your patronage over the past few years. We hope that it has been a useful service for you.

Updates

2010-05-05T21:02:00.005-04:00

A few minor changes to the site today. One of which is that the default ad (for the "All" category) on the left hand side of the home page is now for the currently best selling book rather than DVD. We find that people who use the site regularly are more interested in books than movies.

Improvements

2010-01-03T19:24:00.014-05:00

We've implemented a few improvements to Zlert to start off the new year.

The most visible change is to our search results for books. For most books a "Show other editions" link now appears on the right. This allows you to see all the various editions of a book. For example, paperback or audio CD versions. Hopefully, this will let you find just the copy you are looking for.

The second improvement we've made is to "Release Date" alerts. With Release Date alerts, you set up a reminder for when a new item is released. Up to today, you would simply get a reminder on the release date that was scheduled when you set up the alert. The only issue was, what if this date changed in the meantime? Most don't, but a few do. We now keep track of the release date for you, so you get the reminder on whatever date the item comes out.

Lastly, we made some tweaks to our Search alerts, to improve alerts that match books by a particular author, or movies by a particular director etc.

As always, feedback is very welcome. We are always striving to make our alerts and the site more useful. Let us know if there are any new features or alerts you would like to see. Thanks and have a happy New Year.

Michael Jackson

2009-07-05T17:21:00.004-04:00

One thing to note about Michael Jackson's demise, is that sales of his music and DVDs have been going through the roof.

One thing I like to do is view top sellers in different categories. Zlert makes this straightforward. Just select a category on our home page and type "+TS" in the search box. Try that with Music or DVDs for Amazon.com. Michael Jackson related material nearly fills every slot on the top ten.

Release Date Alerts

2009-05-07T22:40:00.013-04:00

We've just added "Release Date" alerts. You now have the option to receive an alert on the date an item is released, not just when it is available to purchase.

For example, suppose you do a search under "Books" for the author Dan Brown. Right now, you'll probably come across "The Lost Symbol", his new book, due out in the Fall.

You can purchase it now if you want (Amazon won't charge you until they ship it). Suppose though, you just want to be reminded about it when it comes out? Just select the book to set up alerts, and under "Availability changes", check the box beside "Is released".

We'll send you a reminder on the day it comes out.

You can also click on the icon to add it to your calendar.

Also, if you receive an alert from us that lists an item that will be released in the future, there will now be an additional link "Remind me when released", allowing you to set up a release date alert directly from your email.

Let us know what you think. There's a "Feedback" link at the top of virtually every page on Zlert.

2009-02-28T17:25:00.004-05:00

I see Beingfrugal.net, a blog about saving money, recently gave a mention to Zlert in their "News of Note" section. Thanks Lynnae!

Paperback alert change

2009-02-08T20:10:00.006-05:00

Companies that control content, such as movie, record and book companies tend to charge a premium for new releases.

For movies, they want you to watch it on the big screen. DVD and online releases come later. For books, the vehicle they use for premium pricing is the hardcover. Now hardcovers are nice n' all, they keep the pages in better shape. I don't think, though, that your average book publisher is concerned with preventing pages becoming dog-eared. It's simply a tool to charge you more for the exact same content as that in the paperback version.

Now, this model of tight control may change as these companies power is eroded by digital technologies (à la the Record companies). For example, down the road, DVDs may be released at the same time as the movie on the big screen. For now though, with books, you can pay anywhere from $5 to $12 more for the hardcover.

I enjoy reading. I do not, though, like being forced to pay more for the exact same content. I wait for the paperback. How do I know when the book becomes available in paperback? I set up a paperback alert on zlert.

We've made a change to the paperback alerts. Previously you would receive an alert when the book was available to be purchased on Amazon. In practice though, this was often well before the book was released. 5, 6 or 7 months before it actually shipped.

We think it's better to be alerted on the release date itself. Then you know the book is out and you have the option to buy it then or when you finish reading your current book. So, from now on, paperback alerts will let you know on the day the paperback is released. Happy reading!

Kindle alerts

2009-01-12T03:10:00.007-05:00

A user recently requested that we add an alert for when the Kindle version of a book is available. We thought that was a great idea. We've just added it.

To use, simply choose a book for which there is no Kindle version yet, click on the "Set up alerts" button, and under "Availability changes", check the box to receive an alert when the Kindle version is available.

Great suggestion. Use the "Feedback" link at the top of every page on Zlert to request other alerts you'd find useful.

Search alerts improvement

2009-01-12T03:01:00.003-05:00

We've just added the capability to set up a Search Alert even when the search does not currently return any items. Previously, you could only set up an alert when the search actually returned some results.

Why is this useful? Suppose, for example, Amazon currently doesn't stock a brand of chocolate you love. Nothing is returned when you do a search on Zlert. Now you can set up a Search Alert for the brand (remember to choose Grocery or Gourmet Food as the category to get specific results) and receive an alert as soon as Amazon sells it.

Zlert updates

2008-12-31T18:00:00.005-05:00

Well, we've been hard at work improving the site for you. Here are some of the changes we've made:

New categories:

Amazon.com - added Shoes as separate category
Amazon.co.uk - added Clothing, updated PC & Video Game sub-categories
Amazon.ca - added Electronics
Amazon.de - added Auto (Auto & Motorrad), Clothing (Bekleidung)

With these new categories (and their sub-categories), just like the other categories, you can set up search alerts for new items matching a search and get lists of top sellers (type +TS in the search box - here's an example).

Price Alert:

We've added availability to our price alert email. This is so you know who is selling the item. Third-party sellers are listed with "Available from Amazon Marketplace Sellers". Amazon itself is listed with expected shipping time (e.g. "Usually ships in 24 hours").

For price alerts of new items, we default to looking at the Amazon price, we only look at third-party or marketplace seller prices when Amazon doesn't directly sell the item or is out of stock. Of course, for used prices we look at marketplace sellers.

Happy shopping!

2008-12-31T17:27:00.006-05:00

I see "Never Shopped Out", an Australian shopping blog, recently gave Zlert a mention. It was on their list of useful price alert web sites. One typo though. They misspelled Zlert as "ZAlert" :( .

New home page

2008-09-07T23:38:00.005-04:00

We've made some tweaks to Zlert. The most obvious is a new home page. There's a bit more explanation as to what the site is about and the 1-2-3 steps are now displayed horizontally instead of vertically, so more information fits above the "fold" on the page. We've also added the shopping bag image, above, to emphasize more how Zlert can help you with all of your shopping.

More minor changes:

The "More options" link does not appear for the "All" category on the home page as is it is not relevant. It only appears when you select individual categories, such as Books, DVD or Grocery.

"Create an alert from any Amazon page" (Zlert Button) now moved over to the left side.

Added a help page for using the Zlert Button with the new Google Chrome browser.

If you type "TS" in the search box, instead of "+TS", you will see "Did you mean to search for Top Sellers (+TS)?" above the search results, with a link to the top sellers for that category. With Zlert, you can view the top ten best selling items in any category or sub-category on Amazon. Just select a category and type "+TS". People occasionally leave out the "+" in "+TS", so this is just a reminder.

We are always striving to make Zlert better and we will continue to hone it to make it more useful to you. We welcome any feedback. Let us know if we are hitting or missing the mark. Thanks.

989+ Cool Things

2008-09-01T17:27:00.004-04:00

Zlert was featured recently on 989+ Cool Things. It's a blog about sites with services that catch the author's fancy. Thanks for the review.

Note, I said featured recently. The post on the 989+ site is dated May 7th, which is clearly wrong. Zlert wasn't available then.

2008-09-01T16:53:00.006-04:00

Zlert was added to the Listio directory a while back. Listio is a directory of Web 2.0 applications and web sites. It fills a similar niche to Ziipa, which featured zlert a while back. They also have a few longer reviews of sites and applications. Nicely done.

startupBLIPS Review

2008-08-13T00:30:00.003-04:00

Chris over at startupBLIPS has just posted a review of zlert. His blog is about startups and startup-related tech news. He is currently working on his second startup, after switchplanet.com, a site for trading DVDs, books, games and CDs.

He's clearly taken the time to write a thoughtful review. Thanks Chris! Best of luck with your new startup.

Top Ten Sellers

2008-08-06T23:23:00.010-04:00

One of the things I personally enjoy on zlert is being able to easily view lists of top sellers in any category. It's easy to keep up with what items are hot right now.

All you have to do is select a category in the drop down menu on the search page and type "+TS" and hit the "Go" button. Putting the "+" in front is important - it marks it as a special search.

For example, here is a list of the top ten toys on Amazon.com, labeled 1 to 10.

On the search results page, you can change category and hit the "Go" button again, to see another categories top ten. I often spend time flipping between categories, just to see what folks are buying.

Drill down within a category to see top ten lists in various sub-categories. For example for Sci-F i DVDs.

You can also set up an alert to have the top ten items in any category or sub-category emailed to you on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Liking movies, I have the list of top ten selling DVDs emailed to me every morning.

Improved alerts for Amazon.com Electronics

2008-08-03T19:33:00.003-04:00

When you are on Amazon.com, you may notice some items, in particular for Electronics, have a "Click here to see the price" link. For example, see this Samsung TV. Seemingly, they are prevented by Manufacturer agreements from displaying or advertising the price when it's below a certain amount. This, of course, is a bit annoying for customers, but it's not Amazon's fault.

This has presented a problem for us too. Amazon, in the data feed they supply us with, do not list the price for these items. Kind of difficult to do price alerts etc. when we aren't given the price. In our search results too, we were not displaying the new price of these items.

Fortunately, we've just solved this problem. For search results, you will now see a "Select item to view price" for the new price. Selecting the item will display its price. You can always deselect it if you don't want to set up an alert or buy it right now. For example, see this list of the current best selling TVs.

When we check prices for Price and Price Guarantee alerts, we now also obtain the current price for these "hidden price" products. So, you can be assured that we will now find out about price drops for all Electronic items on Amazon.com. Happy Saving!

2008-07-25T23:10:00.003-04:00

Red Orbit made zlert a site of the day today. It's a site with news, video and images mainly of technology, science, health and space. Thanks to the Red Orbit team!

2008-07-25T22:25:00.004-04:00

Ziipa.com, a directory of Web 2.0 applications, kindly asked us to submit an entry. It's available in all its glory at http://www.ziipa.com/view/Zlert_-_Amazon_Alerts.

Ziipa is interesting in that it reminds me of killerstartups.com. However, they provide a screenshot of the site and the synopsis is provided by the site themselves. Like Killerstartups, you can vote on the site and leave comments.

Both Ziipa and Killerstartups have one other thing in common. They boggle my mind with how many startups or new websites come online every day. All providing a wide range of functionality.

Netcraft identified 172 million sites in their June survey. That's an increase of 3.9 million a month or 130,000 a day. Of course, many of those are personal sites, blogs, non-profits, educational etc. Not sure how many are startups, but I'm sure it's a pretty high number.

2008-07-25T22:05:00.003-04:00

Makeuseof.com added zlert to their directory a few days ago. It's a site for "Cool Websites, Software and Internet Tips". Has some interesting content.

One minor point about their logo, is that they shouldn't really be using a JPEG for an image that is all text. As you can see on the site, the logo suffers from some nasty compression artifacts. For example, you see some fuzzy ghosting around the letters, for example the "f" in "of".

When an image is mainly text, PNG or GIF files do a nice job of reducing size, but preserving the crispness of the letters. JPEG is really better for photographs. See the Wikipedia article on the JPEG format for details.

First blog about zlert in French

2008-07-22T00:59:00.003-04:00

I see Sylvain Drapau posted an item on his blog about zlert on Saturday. Unfortunately, his site was unavailable most of the weekend, so only got to see it today. He gives an overview of zlert with links to our YouTube video and slidecasts. For those of you who (like me) have seen what little high-school French they had reduced to pidgin-French, a Google translation is also available. Merci beaucoup Sylvain!

We try to cater to an international audience on zlert. We currently support alerts for 5 Amazon stores, - US, Canada, UK, Germany and France. If you are visiting the site from France, for example, the default store on the home page will be amazon.fr, from Germany, amazon.de etc.

Right now, the site is only in English, although the search results are in French and German for amazon.fr and amazon.de respectively. We hope eventually to have complete French and German translations available.

2008-07-20T16:46:00.006-04:00

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.

2008-07-19T23:21:00.005-04:00

I see SimpleSpark has added zlert to its list of applications. To be honest, I hadn't heard of the site, which started last year. It describes itself as "the place to find and share a new world of web applications". It's basically a directory of web applications. It's done pretty well.

The description they wrote for us is a little sparse and a bit inaccurate:

"Shopping alerts so that you know when prices drop."

Obviously, price alerts is one thing we do, but we do a lot of other kinds of shopping alerts too. For example, search, wishlist, reminders, accessory alerts etc. We like to think of ourselves as a comprehensive site with all kinds of shopping alerts.

Still, that's a minor quibble. We appreciate the coverage. They were also pretty fast to include us. Thanks guys!

2008-07-16T20:19:00.010-04:00

Charles Knight of ReadWriteWeb, has posted an article about zlert, and a link to our video, on AltSearchEngines.

YouTube Video

2008-07-05T03:00:00.006-04:00

Just uploaded our first video to YouTube. It's a quick introduction to the site:

Like all screencasts on YouTube, it's pretty fuzzy. Not as clear as the slidecasts we did on slideshare.net.

The Mankini

2008-07-05T02:09:00.005-04:00

Came across this on zlert the other day. It's the Official Borat Mankini Thong. It's the top selling item under "Swimming" in Sports & Leisure on Amazon UK. Unfortunately, not available in the US. Is that a cultural difference?

Now live

2008-07-01T02:15:00.003-04:00

Well, we're finally live. Have taken the wraps off the site and opened it to the public. Thanks to all who participated in the private beta. Appreciate you taking the time.

Those of you that are new to zlert, welcome. Please look around and let us know what you think.

In the beginning...

2008-06-02T20:17:00.002-04:00

zlert started with an itch. I had just watched the movie "Infernal Affairs". It's a Hong Kong thriller, which Martin Scorsese's "The Departed" was based on. I thought, I wouldn't mind owning that, if it was the right price. In other words, what was it worth to me?

Now, things like DVDs, once they are no longer "hot", tend to fall in price. I had just watched it, I was in no rush, I'd wait. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a site where I could enter the price I wanted to pay and it would alert me when the item was that price? At the time, there weren't really many places where I could do that. So, I decided to write my own. The result is zlert.

As I started to code it, I realized that there was really a whole range of useful product alerts that you could create. So, now we have not just price alerts, but search alerts, accessory alerts, top seller alerts etc. zlert specializes in product alerts. If you can think of a generally useful alert that we are not covering, let us know. You can use the comments below or our Feedback page.

I do want to emphasize that this is your site, not mine. It's here to provide a useful service. Period. We can only do that if we hear from you.

One other point I want to make is about privacy. Your privacy. We respect it. Of course, we will never rent or sell any information you provide. Nor will we send alerts or emails that you did not subscribe to. When you sign up for zlert, all we ask is your email address (so we can send you alerts) and a password. We will not ask for your zip or postal code, not even your name. Only the very minimum amount of information we need.

I hope to use this blog to give tips, tricks and general info about using zlert. Stay tuned.