Ever buy more than one book at a time? Want to compare prices easily? Then bookmark “Bookkoob”
The majority of price comparison sites are poor at helping you save money when you shop for more than one item. Normally, you pick an item, and they’ll give you the best price on that item. That’s great if you want a single item, but where are the services that help you find the best deal when you are looking to buy multiple items?
Bookkoob.co.uk is the first site I’ve used that solves this price comparison problem for books, and their sister site Bookkoob.com solves the same problem for the US.
Bookkoob has a “comparison cart” function. Just add the books you want to buy to the comparison cart and it’ll calculate the combination of shops to buy the books from to save you the most money.
For example, I just used the comparison cart to buy four books. The cheapest way Bookkoob recommended to buy these books was to order two books from amazon.co.uk, one book from dvd.co.uk, and the final book from Tesco.
Thanks for saving me a few quiddiuq Bookkoob.
(On May 3rd, 2007 at 3:31 pm)
BookkooB is my site and I just wanted to thank you for spreading the word about the site.
The comparison cart is, as far as I know, a unique feature which has taken a lot of time to create so it’s great when we hear people are finding it useful.
I’m pleased to announce here that we have just released a new version of the comparison cart that is much faster than the previous version. In tests today the old version took around 6 minutes to process a cart of 5 books - which wasn’t that bad when you consider there are over 600,000 possible purchase combinations to check. The new version can do the same check in a fraction of a second!
The big advantage to this speed increase is that more books can be checked in a reasonable about of time. A cart of 11 books is now processed in around a minute - though that time does depend on how many stores stock each book.
This is the first stage in a number of additions planned for the coming 6 months to make the site even more useful to users.
Thanks again for your kind comments.
(On May 3rd, 2007 at 3:15 pm)
Hi Richard,
Congrats on a great site, I’ve been using bookkoob.co.uk regularly for a long time now. I’m looking forward to seeing the new features, please let me know when they are released.
I think and hope we’ll be seeing more and more sites doing this for other products that tend to favour multiple purchases like DVDs and CDs.
A comparison cart that compares DVDs, CDs and books together would be so useful for Christmas gift shopping.
PS. What are your thoughts on making a single search box for ISBN and/or title/author? I (only very slightly) resent the extra click needed to get to the ISBN advanced search.
(On May 3rd, 2007 at 4:02 pm)
A combined site is exactly what we are currently working on! The first job was to ensure we could calculate a cart quickly with the number of items people purchase at Christmas - I had 26 items to get last year, for me and my family, and that took a lot of time to get the best way to purchase.
Processing that size cart in a reasonable time is still a little way off but we still have a few ideas up our sleaves to further optimise the calculation.
I’ve just made a quick update to the search routines so you can now enter an ISBN into what was the title search boxes to get straight to the book. You can also just enter bookkoob.co.uk/ followed by the ISBN (e.g bookoob.co.uk/0747591059) into your browser if you want to save one more click!
(On May 3rd, 2007 at 4:06 pm)
I really shouldn’t miss-type my own domain!