Third party retailers on Amazon may use different shipping providers and different shipping methods. They often do that to cut down the costs of shipping the goods to the customer.

This may be problematic if unreliable shipping providers are used.

Some users because of this may want to only buy first party sold products on Amazon shopping sites. And while that’s possible manually, it requires paying attention to the merchant listing on Amazon item pages.

Amazon lists who is selling the item. Items sold by Amazon are listed as such, while items sold by third party merchants list the name of the merchant there.

Shipped and sold by Amazon is a Firefox extension that filters out all items that are not sold by Amazon directly. The extension works on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de and Amazon.fr.

Filtering out items may have consequences on item availability on Amazon. Items that would otherwise be available may be filtered out so that they cannot be purchased on Amazon as long as the filter is on. It happens quite often though that Amazon and third parties both sell the item on Amazon. The extension in this case makes sure that the item sold directly by Amazon is displayed to the user.

The extension needs to be activated with a click on its toolbar item. Some Firefox users may not see the icon by default. If that’s the case, they need to right-click a blank spot on a toolbar, select customize from the context menu, and drag and drop the sold by Amazon icon to one of the browser toolbars. A click on the icon activates it, another deactivates the filter again.

Firefox users can download and install the add-on at the official Mozilla add-ons repository.

So called filler items are small inexpensive items that move the purchase over that threshold so that Amazon sends the items for free to your location.

One example to make it clearer: Say you have decided to buy the latest Harry Potter Blu-Ray on Amazon. It currently retails for $24.99. If you would only buy that item you would have to pay shipping costs on top of that price which would add $2.98 to the overall price that you have to pay. Shipping costs are even higher in other categories.

If you could find an item on Amazon that is sold for $0.01 you would save $2.97. This may not look as much but if your orders often do not qualify for Super Saving Shipping but come close then you may save quite some money over time.

Amazon Prime

Before we look at websites that let you search for filler items on Amazon, we should take a look at Amazon Prime.

If you order many smaller items on Amazon you may want to consider becoming an Amazon Prime member. You basically pay a yearly membership fee and get free shipping for all items on Amazon for the year. You find more information about Amazon.com Prime on the official website. You can sign up for a trial to test Amazon Prime.

Amazon Filler Services

Filler Item Finder

A rather messy looking website that claims to be in association with Amazon.com. You can enter the amount that you need for free shipping and filter by categories if you get to many results.

The site managed to return a lot of cheap items on Amazon, but only one $0.01 item and that was for a HTC Droid Eris Android Phone with a Verizon Wireless subscription. The second item would set you back $0.12 at the time of writing.

Cheapest item in the database: $0.13

FillerSeek

You can enter the amount needed to be eligible for free shipping on the Fillerseek website. It is furthermore possible to select a specific category that the filler item should be in. A click on search crawls the Amazon product database for products that match the requirements.

The site then displays products on the search results page. I was disappointed by the results, considering that the site suggested four or more Dollar items when my search explicitly asked for a $0.01 filler item.

Cheapest item in the database: $1

Amazon Filler Item Finder

This one is as basic as it gets. Just enter the amount you need to qualify for free shipping and hit the search button afterwards. You get a large list of product suggestions.

Like the other services so far, this one did not manage to find a one cent item on Amazon. Popular and very popular items are highlighted in the results listing. There is no option to filter by product group.

The site has a separate search engine for Canada and the United Kingdom.

Cheapest item in the database: $0.37

Superfillers

This service supports not only Amazon but other popular shopping destiations such as The Home Depot, Target or Petco. Just select the shopping site that you need filler items for on the left sidebar of the page and enter the amount that you are looking for.

The service displays items coming closest to the selected price first and then below that sorted into categories. This is actually more comfortable and eye pleasing than what the other services offered so far.

Cheapest item in the database: $0.37

Click Filler

Clickfiller displays a list of inexpensive products on the company’s start page. You can use the form at the top to filter for a specific price range, product names or categories.

The service, just like Filler Seek, fails to list the cheapest items on Amazon.

Cheapest item in the database: $0.99

Slick Fillers

Maintained by Slick Deals. You can search for a specific price and filter results by keyword or category.

The service, like many others fails to find one or two cent items on Amazon.

Cheapest item in the database: $0.40

Browser Extensions

Instead of using a third party website you can also use browser extensions to find filler items. PriceTrace is a price comparison add-on for the Firefox web browser that can search for filler items.

Just click on the fillers button in the toolbar when you are on Amazon. This opens a page on the official Pricefiller website that lists the filler items in the service’s database. Users who do not want to install an add-on for that can visit the page manually in every browser to search for items manually.

It does not make a lot of sense to install the add-on just for the price filler functionality, considering that you can add the search page on the PriceTrace website to your browser’s bookmarks to open it manually. Firefox users who use other features of the add-on, like price tracking, may find it handy on the other hand.

Cheapest item in the database: $0.56

Manual hunting for filler items

You can also try to find cheap items directly on Amazon to qualify for free shipping. Use a search like this one filler items search to find cheap items in the Industrial and Scientific category. There is even one item in the listing that you can buy for $0.01.

Verdict

Who would have thought that the cheapest filler items are not in the databases of the filler item services. All services do a lot better when the price that is needed to be eligible for free shipping goes up. Most shine starting around the $1 mark.

Manual hunting for items gets my recommendation if you are looking for items below the $1 Dollar mark.

Have another service to share? Let me know about it in the comments.

Update: The Pricetrace website is no longer available. Links have been removed.

Sometimes I encounter an item that I want to buy only to find out during checkout that I cannot. Amazon then displays one-liners like “We are not able to ship this item to your default shipping address”, “We’re sorry. This item can’t be shipped to your selected destination” or “The following items cannot be shipped to the addresses you selected”.

The free Firefox and Google Chrome extension “Does Amazon Ship to?” offers a solution. Amazon customers can use it to retrieve information if a specific product on the online shop’s website is shipping to a selected country.

The browser extension works with all localized Amazon stores, in particular with Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr and Amazon.de.

Once installed, the button appears on every Amazon product page. The button is added to the page after the page has been completely loaded. It may even take a second or two before it appears.

When you click on the button you see a country pulldown menu where you have to select the country you want the item to be shipped to.

Does Amazon Ship to will then retrieve the shipping information and display them in the program interface. All merchants, including third party merchants selling the item are displayed here with their asking price and, if available, shipping costs.

Basically, if you see a price and merchant you know that the item will be shipped to the selected country. If you do not see a merchant, you know it won’t.

Firefox users can download Does Amazon Ship to from the official Firefox add-on repository. Google Chrome users find the extension in the Chrome Web Store instead. (via)

Depending on the item at hand you can save thousands of Dollars by searching for discounted items on the Amazon website.

Before we start exploring the possibilities take a look at some of the possible discounts that you can currently find at Amazon.com.

Those are some heavy price reductions. A $10,000 discount on a watch, almost $1,500 on a Camera and $24,000 on an engagement ring.

Here is the basic structure of the url that can be used to search Amazon for discounts only:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/?node=502394&pct-off=75-99

There are three parts in that url that need to be modified.

1. amazon.com: change amazon.com to another url if you would like to shop in that Amazon store instead, e.g. amazon.co.uk

2. node=502394: the node specifies the category that the search is conducted in.

3. off=75-99: This specifies the discount. You can enter any figure between 00 and 99. This example would search for discounts between 75% and 99% of the original price.

You can use the basic url outlined above to search for discounts in any category that you want. The node is always displayed when you navigate on the Amazon website. Simply copy and paste the node of the category that you would like to search into the basic url.

It is often best to search for discounts in the 50% to 75% range as discounts above that are not often found on Amazon shopping portals. It is still possible to find those every now and then though. You can also bookmark the searches directly to open them again at a later point in time.

This still might not be a problem if you do not need the items that can be shipped earlier right away but it could be problematic if the preordered or unavailable item is expected to be available in months. There is one simple rule that helps in that case: Never mix available and unavailable (preorder or otherwise) items in the Amazon store. This might lead to slightly higher shipping and handling costs but it will ensure that the available items will arrive in the usual shipping schedule.

One way to handle this is to add all available items to the cart and complete the purchase before doing the same for the items that are not available at the moment. If you already made the purchase you can still split items in the options of the Amazon order summary for that order. This will usually split the available items from the unavailable ones.

Update: You may also be interested in Amazon Filler items. These can be helpful to cross the free shipment threshold to receive free shipping from Amazon.

Even better that you can cancel the service at anytime. It is a bit sad that this service is currently only available on Amazon.com but it could happen that the localized Amazon portals in other countries will follow the lead if the service turns out to be a success.

What I like is that you do get a 15% discount and that the items are shipped freely to your location. This could be especially useful for household items that you use on a daily basis. Amazon offers five main categories that hold items, those are: Baby & Child Care, Food & Snacks, Health & Wellness, Household Supplies and Personal Care & Beauty.

The benefit of using a service like this is that you do not have to think of buying an item when you are running out of supplies. I’m not saying that you will never again run into a situation where you are running out of toilet paper or coffee because you still have to select a schedule for the delivery.

The danger that I see is that it could happen that you get either to many items delivered or to few. It probably will take some time until you set the right schedule for the household items. Most items seem to come in packages of two or more which explains the pricing. It did look a bit high on first glance but considering that you do sometimes get 2,3 or even 4 items for that price it sounds reasonable again.

The free Amazon Price Watcher aids you in this task. It allows you to search many Amazon stores – including those for the United States, Great Britain, Germany and Canada) – using the Amazon Price Watcher interface. Just search for products in selected categories and save interesting results in a library. The library offers fast access to information such as price and availability including a price chart which displays the overall price trend.

Product images and additional information will be displayed if available. This is great for an overview. The item will be displayed with a green background if your target price is higher than the actual price of the item at Amazon indicating that it would be a good time to purchase it right away.

I’m using the amazon Price Watcher for some time now and can only recommend it to everyone who makes occasional purchases at amazon.