Frequently asked questions

It’s an add-on which discreetly notifies you if the product you’re browsing is available more cheaply from another retailer. The notification provides a convenient button which links you straight through to the relevant product page on the competing retailer’s website.

The invisible hand was originally mentioned by the 18th century economist, Adam Smith. Smith’s idea has been generalised since he suggested it, but the essence of his argument is that in a free market, individuals will pursue their own self-interest, and the consequences of this will be beneficial for the rest of society. If each person can choose what to buy, and each producer can choose what to sell and what price to sell it at, there will be a more efficient distribution of prices and products. Prices will be lower, quality will be higher, and the best sellers will make the largest profits. Smith didn’t have Firefox to help make his point, but we hope he would approve if he was alive today.

If you buy a product after clicking on the button in an InvisibleHand notification, the retailer pays us a small commission. The price you pay is not affected by the commission. It would be the same price regardless of whether you used InvisibleHand.

InvisibleHand has passed Mozilla’s strenuous vetting process which ensures that it’s safe to use and does not present any security issues. It has also been certified 100% clean by Softpedia.

InvisibleHand does not collect any personally identifiable information. To provide the price notifications, it records the retailer product page URLs which have been browsed, but it does not collect any information about who browsed those pages. No URLs are collected for sites other than retailers. See our Privacy Policy for more details.

There are two possible reasons. The first is that you’re already browsing the cheapest retailer for a particular product. The second (more likely) reason is that InvisibleHand doesn’t yet cover that product or retailer. InvisibleHand is still in beta and we’re gradually growing our coverage of products and retailers. There are lots of products missing at the moment, but we’re working hard to fill the gaps as quickly as possible. Check out the Products & Retailers page for more info on what we cover.

InvisibleHand is still in beta, so there are retailers it doesn’t cover yet. We’re adding new products and retailers as quickly as possible. Check out the Products & Retailers page for more info on what we cover.

Sorry about that. Invisiblehand’s product-matching technology is usually very accurate, but it does make mistakes sometimes. We’re working towards perfect accuracy (i.e. no mistakes at all!) In the mean time, if you get linked to the wrong product, please email us the product page URL and we’ll make sure it gets fixed

Yes. This can be a pretty annoying. Getting our notifications to accurately reflect the cost of P&P is actually quite tricky. We’re working on it, but we decided to wait until we’ve got this problem nailed rather than releasing it broken.

The version for Google Chrome is already available and the support for Internet Explorer is coming in 2010. The Chrome version lacks a few features the Firefox's version has but we're working hard to make it better.

InvisibleHand works with retailers in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany. We expect to roll out support for Canada soon. If you’d like InvisibleHand to support retailers in your country, drop us an email!

Excellent! Drop us an email and we’ll walk you through the steps to get your business covered by InvisibleHand.