To be honest I had no idea what this gadget was when I first came across it. It was something to do with online shopping so I smiled and pressed download... only where had it gone? It took another few hours and a trip to Amazon.co.uk to finally see the appeal of Invisible Hand. It’s a price comparison tool and very useful it is too!

Invisible Hand was originally an economic term for self-regulation of the markets. The idea being that in a free market, producers would benefit by competitive access to customers and customers would benefit by lower prices. This new Invisible Hand, while not being so grandiose, works in much the same way. As you jump onto compatible sites, a yellow tag will appear at the top of your screen, informing you of where to find a better price. It doesn’t just work with online stores however, it also works on Google, which makes this very convenient to use.

Invisible Hand is also very easy to use. Aside from the initial download, I haven’t had to lift a finger. If I go into Amazon and search for ‘Where the Wild Things are’, Invisible Hand will tell me that I can find the DVD £0.06 cheaper on another site. If I go onto Google and type in ‘The Secrets of Sexual Body Language’, Invisible Hand will not only give me the cheapest price available, it will also tell me how many sites are selling that book.
Some other things you should know about Invisible Hand:-

• It currently covers retailers in the US, UK and Germany
• It’s compatible with Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer (so far)
• It covers a huge number of retailers including Amazon, Curry’s, John Lewis, HMV and Boots
• It’s more useful than you initially realise!

It’s very hard to find anything I don’t like about Invisible Hand. It’s unobtrusive, quick and very accurate! I guess I could complain that it sometimes doesn’t appear, but apparently that’s expected if you’ve already found the lowest price. Currently Invisible Hand doesn’t compare phone prices or cover Canada, but apparently both of them are coming soon.

If you're the type to be concerned about online privacy here's a quote from the Invisible Hand website:-
'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.'

I really didn’t realise how useful this gadget was when I first put it onto my laptop, but now I’d give it a 10/10.

Download from http://www.getinvisiblehand.com/