• by Shankar Gupta , December 30, 2005

A new site, AmazonCreditsYou.com, aims to help shoppers at the e-commerce giant enforce Amazon's policy of giving customers rebates when prices drop within 30 days of a purchase.

The site invites users to submit their e-mail addresses and the ISBN numbers of the items they purchase from Amazon.com. If Amazon.com drops the price of an item within 30 days, AmazonCreditsYou.com--which has no affiliation with Amazon.com--sends users an e-mail message telling them they can submit a request for a credit for the difference.

Site co-creator Scott Thompson said he and the other founder, Keith Kritselis, got the idea for the site based on their own experiences as Amazon consumers. "We've bought stuff from Amazon over time, and always forgot to check back and see if the price changed. We were just too busy doing other things," said Thompson. "So, we decided to automate it. Since we do read our e-mail a lot, we realized that if we could send ourselves an e-mail notice, that would be simple and efficient."

Registration with the site is free, and the site is monetized via a Google AdSense unit and an Amazon affiliate ad unit. Thompson said the site does not have an official privacy policy yet, but the e-mail addresses collected by the site are not shared with third parties, and there are no plans to do so in the future.

The site is built off of Amazon.com's public application programming interface, and was designed by Thompson and Kritselis, who have designed sites such as CutestDamnBaby.com, where people post and rate baby pictures, and MyPollingSite.com, which directs users to Web sites with information about the locations of local election polling places.