Ciuvo identifies items on shopping sites automatically, pulls price and other information from its database, and displays those information in a small toolbar that it attaches to the top of the web page.

This toolbar highlights the cheapest price it found in its database, the number of total sites carrying the item, and links to additional information like product videos.

You can use the information to compare the price on the site you are currently on to the cheapest price that Ciuvo found in its product database. This can be reassuring if the site you are on has the cheapest price, or a money saver if it does not. Details about each offer are displayed in the menu that opens up when you move the mouse cursor over offers in the toolbar.

Here you see the price and shipping information, whether the product is available, the store’s rating and a short description of the product.

A click opens the item’s page on the shopping site in a new browser tab. It is still important to compare the product details on all shipping pages to make sure that the same product is offered on both. The add-on had for instance issues identifying different product versions on a single Amazon item page. It always compared the price of the default product with its database.

Ciuvo checks YouTube for product videos which can be viewed directly on the shopping site. Just hover with your mouse over the video menu and select one of the videos to watch it directly in an overlay on the page.

Here is a short add-on demonstration video.

Ciuvo is only compatible with select online shops in the US, UK, Austria, Germany, France and Poland. Firefox users interested in an unobtrusive price comparison add-on should check it out.

We have taken a look at price comparison add-ons for Firefox (see Firefox Price Comparison or Price Comparison With Invisible Hand For Firefox for starters) and Google Chrome (View Item Price History Of Amazon, Best Buy And NewEgg or Top Google Chrome Shopping Extensions) in the past.

BookInfoLine is a userscript that is currently only compatible with the Firefox web browser. The userscript concentrates on book price comparison. It supports several of the largest book retailers in the world and concentrates largely on the English book market. It checks for instance on various Amazon stores, eBay, Walmart, Google Books, Barnes and Nobles and Abebooks. The userscript furthermore checks for audio and Kindle editions as well.

How does it work then? You simply visit a store page that lists a book. The userscript displays an overlay window at the top right, which, when pressed, displays pricing information from all supported online stores.

Links point directly to the book page on the shops that carry the item. All it takes is one click on the shop of choice to load the page and read up on the details. The userscript does not include shipping and handling costs in the price that is fetched from the online book stores. This means it is still up to the user to make that calculation to come up with the best price.

It is possible to save lots of money on book purchases if the userscript is used for price comparison. Then again, it is mostly of use for users from the US and UK, and not so much for users from countries where English is not the primary language.

Firefox users can install the BookInfoLine userscript directly from the userscript.org website.

The Invisible Hand add-on for Firefox is an unobtrusive add-on that will notify the user if it knows of an Internet shop that is offering the product for less than the current shop the user is visiting. It will display a row beneath the tabs in Firefox whenever it found a shop with a lower price. The system only works if the user is visiting one of the 50+ supported Internet shops in the United Kingdom or United States.

The bar with the better price will not appear if there is no better price or if the shop is currently not supported by the Firefox add-on. There are currently a few problems associated with the add-on that I would like to outline below:

• Supports only 50+ shops in the UK or US. That’s ok for popular items but no where in the range that the price comparison services offers.This also means that users from other countries have no use for the add-on unless they do shop in the US or UK.
• A click on the better price button (or the other retailers button) will open that website in the same tab. There is no way of opening the site in a new tab or window.
• The service does not add (potential) shipping costs to the price comparison. It can be that the price at a lower price shop can turn out to be higher if shipping costs are added to the price.
• The service sometimes fails to find the right product. A Guitar Heroes 5 bundle with hardware for the Nintendo Wii for example was said to be about 30 Pounds cheaper at another retailer. It turned out to be that this was the version of the game without the hardware.
• The price comparison is restricted to the same country. It is for example not possible to see if the price in another country is cheaper than the price in the current country. This is probably linked to the shipping costs problem. It would make a lot of sense once more countries of one continent (e.g. Europe) are added so that users from one country could check if the product is a lot cheaper in another country (which often is the case if you look at the German and UK Amazon shop for example).

The service is currently in beta and the developers have already mentioned that they are working on several of the problems listed in this article. Invisible Hand is nevertheless an interesting alternative for Firefox users from the UK and US who do a lot of online shopping. Interested users can take a look at the developer website to see the list of supported retailers or download the add-on from the Mozilla Firefox website.

The Firefox add-on adds itself to the right-click menu. If a phrase has been selected on a webpage it will offer to search for it on various price comparison sites but also directly on shopping sites like eBay, Amazon and various other shopping portals. The sites that are displayed in the right-click menu can be configured by the user. There is however no option (currently) to add custom sites to the list. Only the sites that the software developer has added can be selected.

There is however a large selection of price comparison sites and shopping sites available and it is up to the user to add the ones that he is interested in or regularly using.

The selected shopping portal or price comparison site will be opened in a new tab in Firefox. There is also the option to search for the product in all sites in a category. This simply opens all of the sites in a new tab.

The author provides an option to suggest new websites which might be added to the database of sites at a later point in time. The Firefox add-on comes with a second option. If no text has been selected a right-click and the selection of RightClickBuy from the context menu will open a search form that can be used to search for products on a selected website.