Amazon, the global online shopping giant, makes it hard to find what you’re looking for. Let’s make it easier with a few choice apps, websites, and extensions.
Between these tools, you’ll be able to fix many of the annoyances that you encounter while shopping on Amazon. This includes a cleaner interface without sponsored posts and ads, curated picks of the best products on Amazon, and even a better search engine.
Needless to say, to use any of these, you should have set up an Amazon account and be familiar with buying from the site. If you aren’t, you can learn all about it in our extensive Amazon shopping guide.
Amazon Lite (Chrome): Remove Unwanted Ads and Banners
Amazon’s website design hasn’t changed much in years, and now it looks like a cluttered mess. Just loading the homepage takes a long time, and the search results are full of sponsored items, advertisements, and other unnecessary elements.
Amazon Lite is a free extension for Google Chrome that removes all these distracting and useless artifacts. You get a clean interface for the search results as well as a product’s description, and the user reviews too. It’s a much more pleasing way to browse or search on Amazon.
Speaking of search, Amazon Lite also strips away all the junk on the homepage and leaves you with just the search bar. It’s much faster to load, and far less distracting too.
Download: Amazon Lite for Chrome (Free)
Most Popular (Web): The Most Loved Products on Amazon
Amazon’s “Best Seller” tag doesn’t indicate the best product itself. If you’re unsure about what to buy when you’re faced with too many choices, go to Most Popular and check.
When deciding the best product in any category, Most Popular takes multiple factors into account, including the number of customer reviews, average rating, earnings, purchase/download volume, price, availability and release date. The products are then put into categories (work, wellness, etc.) and lists (like the best coffee maker, the best headphones, etc.) Go through the categories or search for products.
Most Popular also works with apps in the iOS App Store and extensions for Google Chrome, so that’s a neat bonus if you’re looking for software along with products.
FiveStar (Web): Minimalistic, Fast Amazon Search
FiveStar is a replacement for the default Amazon search to get a single page with all the top results. Search for any product or a category, like wireless headphones, and you’ll get the best-rated products.
All you see is the name, the price, and a little picture of the product. It’s nice to see only the top results and not be confused for choice, and without having to scroll too much. You can sort these by price, but none of the other Amazon filters are available at FiveStar.
Trusty Search Assistant for Amazon (Web): Easier Filters and Infinite Scroll
Of course, FiveStar is only useful if you want to quickly find what you want without much fuss. If you’re on a hunt, you’re better off with advanced ways to search Amazon, using tools like Trusty Search Assistant.
This Chrome extension adds a bunch of new options to the search results so that you can quickly filter or sort them according to what you need. It also removes the page-by-page style of results that Amazon uses, and instead goes with an infinite scroll so that you can see all choices at once, and the filters affect them immediately.
These filters are sliders that affect three basic aspects: rating, review count, and price. You can always set these through Amazon’s sidebar, but the sliders make it much more appealing, not to mention they stay on screen all the time.
Download: Trusty Search Assistant for Amazon for Chrome (Free)
DS Amazon Quick View (Chrome): Preview Product Page Without Clicking
You search for something in Amazon, you see a list of products, but to find the right one, you need to keep clicking back and forth between the results page and the product page. Well, no more. DS Amazon Quick View lets you preview the product page without ever leaving the results.
Just hover the mouse cursor over the item’s image, and this nifty Chrome extension jumps into action. It will show the details you need to know such as the product description, item’s shipping weight, shipping charges, average customer review, and other information that can help you decide. The extension also shows data about the seller, so you don’t end up buying from an untrustworthy source.
DS Amazon Quick View only works with the Amazon USA website. If you want to use it with other Amazon country sites, or get extra features like price history, purchase the Extended DS Amazon Quick View add-on.
Download: DS Amazon Quick View for Chrome (Free)
For Weird, Cool, or Discounted Products…
These websites and extensions are useful when you know what you want on Amazon. But well, Amazon has some offbeat items that you probably don’t know about (and didn’t know you wanted).
You should check out this list of websites to find cool, weird, or discounted items on Amazon. You never know what will catch your eye.
Read the full article: 5 Tools to Find the Best Things to Buy on Amazon Quickly
