Cart Control - Bulk Shopping Amazon

If you are an occasional book purchaser, Amazon is perfect for you. You can drop on in and purchase used or new books quite easily. Picking up the most recent Harry Potter book is simple as long as you don't do it on the release date. When in college, I relied on websites like Amazon and Half.com for most of my computer science textbook needs. As soon as I discovered that I could get books at a fraction of the cost of publisher and bookstore prices I was hooked.

A few years have passed now and I had a thought, "Why don't the bookstores buy their books from Amazon?". If they could purchase books as cheaply as I could, they could finally begin lowering prices. After a few months of research, some experimental large orders through Amazon for a test college bookstore, I came upon the answer.

a) You may not purchase more than 50 items at a time from Amazon. Well that was a problem, the university that I agreed to buy books for needed about 3,000.
b) Credit card companies will even mark the 50 items as fraud. Forget ordering two orders of 50 items in a row. I begged, pleaded, and groveled to two different credit card companies but failed to get them to remove this restriction.
c) The website isn't built for bulk purchasing. Everything is done manually and can take hours and hours to do if you have more than a dozen or so textbooks to purchase.

Ah, but luckily there are some solutions to these problems.

a) No solution to this one - but it can become less annoying.
b) Don't use a credit card. Using alternatives forms of payments this problem can be overcome.
c) I needed a tool for this one, and that is where Cart Control comes in.

Cart Control makes this whole process a bit less painful. It asks you what books you want, how much you are willing to spend on each, and how many you need; then automatically builds your shopping cart for you. It keeps each cart below the 50 item threshold and allows bookstores to then go through and purchase each subset of books directly from Amazon.

The tool is free right now and can be downloaded from Alloken's website. Hopefully soon it will expand to support other used retailers.

Now, just to get the word out to college bookstores that there is something they can do on their own to lower college textbook prices!