Since Amazon resumed shipping electonics to Ireland earlier this year they’re definitely worth checking out when you’re shopping around. The problem with browsing their site is that all the prices are in pounds sterling with no euro conversion. You don’t know exactly how much something is going to cost until you get to the very last page in the checkout process. That’s the page where they show the euro price with irish VAT applied.

To make life a bit easier I’ve put together a little greasemonkey script that adds the irish price below each pound sterling price when you’re on a product details page. Here’s what it looks like,

Amazon Product with Irish Price

To install the script ensure you have the Greasemonkey plugin installed and then click the “Install” button on this page.

Some points to note,

  • the calculation is approximate since the exchange rate won’t be the exact one used by Amazon
  • shipping isn’t accounted for. if you’re ordering over £25(~€28) worth of stuff then shipping will be free but below that you’ll pay the usual prices
  • to determine if a product is a book (and hence exempt from VAT) the script simply searchs for the text “ISBN-10” so there could be false positives
  • Irish VAT is assumed to be 21.5% 21%
  • British VAT is assumed to be 15% 17.5%

The homepage for the plugin is http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/64262. The source is available on github.