Browser extension

Avahit publishes one extension, Avahit — Amazon & store price history. On a product page it shows what our own daily price checks say: the lowest price we have recorded, when that store last cut prices and by how much, and cheaper alternatives from our catalogue. It works without an account. Creators can also use it to add a product to their storefront without copying the URL by hand. This page describes exactly what it can and cannot do, because “shopping extension” is a category with a bad reputation and the difference is worth spelling out.

Install it

Download the extension and unpack the folder anywhere on your machine.
In Chrome open chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode, press Load unpacked and pick that folder.
Creators only: open Settings, generate an extension token, and paste it into the extension once (“I’m a creator” in the popup). Shoppers skip this step.

It is not in the Chrome Web Store yet. Unpacked installation asks for no permissions beyond the ones listed below.

What it does

You are on a product page and press the toolbar button. The popup looks the page up and shows what we already know: the lowest price we have recorded for that product, when the store last cut prices on several products at once and by how much, whether it raised prices, and cheaper alternatives from our own catalogue.
If the product is not in our catalogue but the store is, you still see the store’s sales we recorded.
Creators with a token can add the product to their Avahit account through our API, exactly as if they had pasted the link on the site.

What it cannot do

The permissions in the manifest are the whole story:

activeTab — reads the address of the tab you are on only at the moment you click the button. Not in the background, not on other tabs, not while you browse.
storage — keeps a creator’s extension token. Shoppers never enter one.
scripting — used only when you press “Find look-alikes by photo”, to find the largest image on the page you are on.
host_permissions is limited to https://avahit.com/* and nothing else. It has no permission to run on merchant sites at all.

That last line is the important one. Because the extension cannot execute on a merchant’s domain, it is technically incapable of the practices that got shopping extensions banned from affiliate programmes:

it cannot rewrite or overwrite an affiliate link anywhere;
it cannot drop a cookie on a merchant’s site;
it cannot open a link in the background or fire a click you did not make;
it cannot inject coupons, overlays or ads onto a store page;
it cannot read your browsing history or the contents of pages you visit.

The same commitment in policy form is on the no-hijacking page; here it is enforced by the permission model rather than by our promise.

Data it sends

When you open the popup, the address of the current tab is sent to avahit.com to look it up. Nothing is sent while the popup is closed, and no account or token is attached to the lookup.
If you press “Find look-alikes by photo”, the address of the largest image on the page is sent, and our server fetches that image.
If you are a creator and press “Add to Avahit”, the product URL and the title and price you entered are sent with your extension token.

All of it goes to Avahit over HTTPS. No telemetry, no analytics, no third-party services. Your data rights over what ends up on your account are the same as everywhere else — Privacy Policy.

For affiliate networks

We treat the extension as a distinct promotional surface. It is declared as such where a programme requires it, it does not act on merchant domains, and it does not participate in attribution: the affiliate link is created on Avahit, by the creator, after the product is added. If your programme needs a review copy or a written confirmation of the above, write to [email protected] and we will provide both.

Removing it

Uninstall through your browser’s extensions page; nothing is left behind on your machine except the browser’s own record of the uninstall. Removing the extension does not touch your Avahit account or the products you already added.

Questions about the extension: [email protected].